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comScore: RIM, Microsoft face mobile market share crisis

comScore's latest mobile market share figures suggest a shift away from BlackBerry phones, leaving it in a share slump, while Android and iOS maintain good growth.
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor

This time last month, Research in Motion had a stable but low market share compared to the superpowers of Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems.

But the BlackBerry maker faces a market share crisis, according to the latest comScore figures. While Microsoft is still trailing behind in fourth place, only behind Symbian, it continues to lose market share before it has even established itself in the smartphone space.

RIM was finally knocked out of the top five mobile OEMs list, with HTC climbing to 6.3 percent replacing RIM's November to February share of 6.6 percent.

In slightly better news, Samsung retains the top lead as the top handset maker in the U.S., with a steady share of 25.6 percent, just over half of the smartphone market.

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With Samsung and LG's success in the top mobile OEM market, this could be attributable to Android's popularity as the most used mobile operating system in the U.S. market, reaching over half of all U.S. mobile users at 50.1 percent, a rise of 3.2 percent between November and February.

Apple's iOS grew modestly by 1.5 percent to 30.2 percent, holding a near third of the U.S. market share. But there is more suffering in sight for RIM and Microsoft as the two drop 3.2 percent and 1.3 percent respectively.

Microsoft's Windows Phone dropped 1 percent to from 5.4 percent to 4.4 percent between October and January, but hit another major snag as it dropped to 3.9 percent between November and February.

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Outside of hardware and software, what people actually do with their phones in the past three month average is interesting. All activities are up from the previous comScore market share figures, with no decline in any activity.

Text messaging is up, despite email and social networking rising by an increase of 1.1 percentage points compared, but is down by 0.3 percent between the months of October and January, and November and February.

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Image credit: comScore.

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