Research In Motion (RIM) and Microsoft continued to lose market share to Android in the fourth quarter, and the platform maintained its lead over the iPhone, according to new numbers from analytics firm comScore.
The portion of the U.S. smartphone market held by RIM’s BlackBerry devices dropped nearly 6 percentage points to 31.6 percent in the last three months of 2010, while Microsoft saw its market share dip to 8.4 percent. Palm’s webOS declined to 3.7 percent.
Android and Apple were the only two smartphone platforms in the top five to gain market share. Android rose a whopping 7 percentage points to 28.7 percent in the fourth quarter, while Apple’s market share rose less than a percentage point to 25 percent.
Android’s market share passed Apple’s in November 2010, when its portion of the U.S. smartphone market hit 26 percent as a flood of new devices using the open-source operating system were released by carriers.
ComScore also released numbers for the overall U.S. cell phone market. Samsung was the top device manufacturer with 24.8 percent of the market. LG held 20.9 percent while Motorola’s market share slipped nearly 2 percentage points to 16.7 percent.