Android was the leading smartphone platform in the US for the three month average period ending May 2011, with a 38.1 per cent market share, up from 33 per cent in the previous period, according to the latest figures from comScore’s MobiLens service. Samsung was the top handset manufacturer overall, with a 24.8 per cent market share, the same as the previous period.
76.8m people in the US owned smartphones during the period, up 11 per cent from the previous three-month period. Second to Android in the smartphone platform rankings was Apple, with a 26.6 per cent market share (25.2 per cent), with RIM in third on 24.7 per cent (28.9 per cent), Microsoft fourth on 5.8 per cent (7.7 per cent), and Palm in fifth on 2.4 per cent (2.8 per cent).
While the seemingly unstoppable rise of Android leaps out from the stats, the smartphone market share figures for RIM and Microsoft are also worth noting. RIM’s smartphone market share has fallen by 5.7 percentage points since January 2011, when it held a 30.4 per cent share of the market. As for Microsoft, it’s smartphone market share has fallen by more than a third over the past six months, from 9 per cent in November 2010, to 5.8 per cent in May 2011. 
234m Americans aged 13 and over used mobile devices during the period. While Samsung leads the overall rankings with its 38.1 per cent market share, LG is in second place overall with a 21.1 per cent share (compared to 20.9 per cent in the previous period), followed by Motorola on 15.1 per cent (16.1 per cent), Apple on 8.7 per cent (7.5 per cent), and RIM on 8.1 per cent (8.6 per cent).
The MobiLens stats also look at mobile content usage. No great behavioural swings here, but all the numbers are going the right way, with 26.9 per cent of US subscribers playing games on their phone, compared to 24.6 per cent during the previous period; 38.6 per cent using downloaded apps during the three-month period (36.6 per cent); 28.6 per cent accessing social networking sites or blogs (26.8 per cent); and 39.8 per cent using their browser (38.3 per cent).
