Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry in Dead Heat for Most Desirable Smartphone of the Month

Of course, the month we're talking about here is October of 2010, but this sort of data takes time to compile, ye know, and The Nielson Company've done quite a job doing so. According to this study done by the folks at NC, the smartphone market now covers about 27.7% of the whole pie, the pie being the Total Market Share for phones in the USA. Of that smartphone percentage, three competitors stand out the strongest and are surprisingly close in their race for dominance: RIM BlackBerry OS with 27.4%, Google Android OS with 22.7%, and Apple iPhone OS with 27.9%. After that it goes Microsoft Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Linux, and Palm OS, with 14, 3.4, 3.3, and 1.3% respectively. After that, desire sets in, and the numbers get real interesting.

The question NC had for their group of people living in the USA next was what mobile phone users who planned to upgrade to a smartphone next year was desired the most – what would you buy if you got exactly what you wanted? It seems that iPhone is in the lead here for those people who already own a smartphone of some kind, with Android being in second place for that crowd with 28% to Apple's 35%, and Android beating Apple by 2 percentage points in the category for people who at the moment only have featurephones. After that, you can see the scales tip from iPhone and Android to "Not Sure" as age increases, and "Not Sure" and iPhone winning for females while males have an ever-so-slight preference for Android over iPhone, leaving the rest int he dust.

[Via Android Community]