Latest Nielsen Data Shows Smartphone Market Is Stabilizing, Major OS' Hold Steady

Nielsen tracks all sorts of things for people that are interested in various markets. One of the markets that the analytics firm tracks that geeks tend to be really interested in its the market share for various smartphone operating systems. The latest figures are in from Nielsen and it looks like the growth of the major smartphone operating systems may be leveling out. Android is still the most popular OS on the market, but its lead over iOS may have stopped growing.

According to Nielsen, the share of the smartphone market that the Android OS has is holding steady at 36% for the three-month period of February to April 2011. At the same time iOS also held at within a few points of where it has been with 26% of the market. More interesting to me is that the rapid decline of RIM seems to have ended with BlackBerry OS holding steady at 22% to 23% of the market.

Nielsen also reported that the smartphone is now 37% of the entire mobile phone market. The numbers also looked at data usage based on the OS used. Android users are the most data hungry with an average monthly data consumption of 582MB. iOS was second with 492MB of data use each month on average. Surprisingly, WebOS was third in data consumption with 448MB monthly. WebOS has only 3% of the smartphone market according to the latest Nielsen data. RIM was last in data consumption with 127MB consumed each month.

[via Android Community]