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123.3 Million Americans Now Own a Smartphone

While the North American market for mobile network subscription is considered saturated, there's still significant handset upgrade activity. comScore released data that reported the key trends in the U.S. mobile phone marketplace during the three month average period ending November 2012.

The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 26.9 percent market share.

Google Android continued to lead among smartphone platforms, accounting for 53.7 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Apple iOS secured 35 percent of the market.

For the three-month average period ending in November, device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 26.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 1.2 percentage points).

Apple ranked second with 18.5 percent market share (up 1.4 percentage points), followed by LG with 17.5 percent share, Motorola with 10.4 percent and HTC with 5.9 percent.

123.3 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones (53 percent mobile market penetration) during the three months ending in November, up 6 percent since August.

Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 53.7 percent market share (up 1.1 percentage points), while Apple’s share increased 0.7 percentage points to 35 percent.

RIM ranked third with 7.3 percent share, followed by Microsoft (3 percent) and Symbian (0.5 percent).

In November, 75.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device (up 0.3 percentage points).

Downloaded applications were used by 54.2 percent of subscribers (up 0.8 percentage points), while browsers were used by 52.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points).

Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 0.9 percentage points to 39.2 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 33.7 percent of the mobile audience, while 28.7 percent listened to music on their phones (up 0.4 percentage points).

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