Research In Motion's BlackBerry is still the most popular smartphone in the United States, but Apple's iPhone managed to gain a little bit of the market in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from comScore.
RIM's market share declined a full percentage point to 41.6 percent while Apple gained 1.2 percentage points of the U.S. market, bringing its market share to 25.3 percent. Phones based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform lost 1 percentage point and handsets based of Palm's webOS lost 2.2 points of market share.
Google's Android operating system rose 2.7 percentage points, more than doubling its fourth-quarter U.S. market share, to 5.2 percent from 2.5 percent in the third quarter.
ComScore also released data about the top five handset vendors for the U.S. market. Motorola was in top place but lost 1.4 percentage points of market share, bringing its sales to 23.5 percent of the U.S. market. LG and Samsung came in second and third, with 21.9 percent and 21.2 percent of the market, respectively.
Nokia's share of the U.S. market slipped slightly to 9.2 percent while RIM gained just over half a percentage point to bring its market share to 7 percent.
ComScore reported that 234 million peopled aged 13 and older used mobile devices in the United States during December 2009. Sixty-three percent used their phones to send text messages, while 27.5 percent used mobile browsers and 17.8 percent downloaded apps.