Google Android platform reaches 47% of mobile market

Report: Samsung leads as mobile device manufacturer, followed by LG and Motorola

Samsung is holding onto the number one spot for mobile device manufacturing according to a comScore report out late Thursday.

With a 25.6% marketshare, up a slim 0.3 percentage points from the three months leading up to August, Samsung has secured its strength in the mobile market.

Earlier this month, we reported that Samsung shipped 300 million mobile phones to retailers, the highest number ever for the company since joining the mobile phone game in 1998. Sumsung's 2010 mobiles sales were at about 280 million. 

Last October we reported on Samung unseating Apple as the mobile sales king, though the company's stellar Q3 was somewhat qualified at the time by the fact that Apple had not released a new phone for a while.  

This latest comScore report covers the U.S. mobile industry from September through November. The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers. ComScore also found that 234 million American age 13 or older are in the mobile market.

LG held the second largest market share with 20.5% (and half percentage point drop from the three months prior to this report.)

Apple, meanwhile, only maintains 11.2% of the market share -- but showed the greatest growth since the last survey, a 1.4 percentage point increase.

RIM held the smallest market share with 6.5% of the subscribers using their product -- a 0.6 percentage point decrease from the previous survey.

In April, we reported that shipments of BlackBerry smartphones are now estimated to be around 13.5 million, the lower end of the range first forecasted a month ago. As a result, per-share earnings will range between $1.30-$1.37, not $1.47-$1.55 as was previously published. RIM expected revenue to dip slightly below the previously forecasted minimum of $5.2 billion. After the report was released, RIM stock fell a sharp 10%. 

Approximately 91.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in November, up 8 percent from the preceding three month period. 

Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 46.9% market share, up 3.1 percentage points from the prior three-month period. 

Apple maintained is holding strong in the second spot, growing 1.4 percentage point to 28.7% of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16.6%, followed by Microsoft with 5.2%.

A recent release from Flurry data states that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas day and should offer some really interesting result for the next comScore report, especially since it is unclear which platforms those phones were activated with at this time.

For the month of November, 72.6% of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device. This reflected a modest increase of 2.1 percentage points. 

Also downloaded applications were utilized by 44.9% of subscribers (a 3.3 percentage points increase)

With social platforms increasing their mobile access and applications, the number of people logging onto social networking sites or blogs increased 2.1 percentage points to 33.0% for these three months. 

Mobile game playing also grew by 1.2 percentage points to 29.7%.