Apple showed the biggest increase in phone market share in the United States during the second quarter of 2012 while LG showed the biggest fall among top brands, according to the latest numbers from digital tracking firm comScore.
Samsung, which has been hit by legal issues due to a patent lawsuit by Apple, was able to more or less hold on to its market share at about 26%.
The Korean company, however, was the top mobile phone maker during the period, followed by LG, which had 18.4% of the total market (down from 19.2% in the March quarter.)
Apple was at number 3, with a market share of 16.3%, up from 14.4% in the March quarter.
At number four was Motorola, which saw its share slip to 11.2% from 12.5%. HTC, which saw its share rise during the quarter to 6.4% from 6% in the preceding three months, was the only non-Apple brand in the top 3 to see a rise in market share.
Both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android continued to gain operating system (OS) market share at the expense of Blackberry, Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.
Android increased its smartphone operating system market share by 1.4 points to 52.2% while Apple iOS went from 31.4% to 33.4% — a bigger jump than Androids.
Worryingly for Microsoft, the company saw its share slip from 4% to 3.6%.
For the three-month average period ending in July, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices. More than 114 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in July, up 7 percent versus April.
In July, 75.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device (up 1.5 percentage points). Downloaded applications were used by 52.6 percent of subscribers (up 2.4 percentage points), while browsers were used by 51.2 percent (up 2.2 percentage points).
Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 1.9 percentage points to 37.9 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 33.8 percent of the mobile audience (up 0.7 percentage points), while 28.3 percent listened to music on their phones (up 2.5 percentage points), comScore said.