comScore Pre-Holiday 2012 Mobile Numbers Put Samsung, Google, Apple On Top

This week the folks at comScore have revealed their newest mobile device study, it covering the three months ending in November 2012. While it's clear that of the number of US Mobile Subscribers (both smartphone and non-smartphone) ages 13 and plus here are leaning toward Android, it's interesting to note that Apple took the place of LG in market share between here and comScore's last study. What you're seeing here is a 1.4 point gain from Apple to bring it up to 18.5% of mobile subscribers in the USA while LG falls 0.7%, pushing it down to 17.5%.

The top of the list in this study is Samsung with a whopping 26.9% of the mobile market, they also gaining 1.2 points compared to the study done in the three months ending in August of 2012 from comScore. The folks at comScore MobiLens have shown Samsung to be taking a sweet bunch of balloons up to the top of the charts for some time now, due in no small part to the popularity of Google's Android mobile operating system to be sure.

These studies over time have also shown the percentage of smartphone owners to be going up, their current figures showing 53% of the mobile market (anyone with a mobile phone) as owning a smartphone. Of those US Smartphone Subscribers studied, the current top two (and rather dominant) smartphone platforms are Google (with 53.7%) and Apple's iOS (with 35%). Both of these brands continue to gobble up the competition – their percentage continues to go up each cycle while RIM (BlackBerry), Microsoft (Windows Phone), and Symbian continue to go down.

Then there're Mobile Content Usage, a chart that seems to keep the same numbers cycle after cycle after cycle. This 3 month period had no one question change as much as a single percentage point, the highest change being 0.9 points. If you count that and the one change that hit 0.8, you've got Accessing Social Networking Sites or Blogs and Downloading apps as the biggest increases heading in to 2013.

[via ComScore]