33% of U.S. touchscreens are iPhones
Touchscreen phones are on fire, comScore reports, and Apple is leading the pack. For now.
Three months ending Aug. 2009. Source: comScore MobiLens
There's a thundering herd of imitators behind it, but Apple's (AAPL) iPhone still dominates that fastest-growing segment of the U.S. smartphone market, according to a comScore report issued Tuesday.
Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year, comScore reports, easily outpacing the 63% growth of the broader smartphone market.
By last August, nearly 34 million Americans were carrying smartphones, 23.8 million of them touchscreen devices. And of those touchscreen phones, 32.9% were iPhones.
“The iPhone clearly set the trend in the industry for touchscreen devices, so it’s no surprise that it has the largest share of the market,” said comScore VP Mark Donovan. “But as other players have entered the touchscreen market with compelling devices, competition is clearly heating up.”
Donovan mentioned Google's (GOOG) Android platform in particular, although the closest Android contender in August was the T-Mobile (DT) G1 running a distant seventh after two proprietary LG phones, the BlackBerry (RIMM) Storm, the Palm (PALM) Pre and the Samsung Instinct.
Below the fold, comScore's spreadsheets, including one that shows preference by age group. (The smartphone sweet spot seems to be ages 24 to 34.)
I thought the percentage of iPhone is much > just 33% cause I see a lot of iPhones on the streets. Perhaps the report is a little old?
PED said, "Smartphone mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year"
I think that would be the touchscreen growth rate.
ex ped: Yikes! Fixed. Thanks.
@ Mark- I agree, 7.8 iPhone users is too low.
Some of the 8.3M 3G activations were upgrades/replacements, so there are less users than activations. However, the CEO said on the June Qtr call that AT&T had nearly 9M users, so by August, there were probably 10M iPhone users.
The question become is the figure for total touchscreen phones too low? Or is the iPhone share of touch screens too low? Or both…
According to AT&T quarterly reports, there were at least 8.3m iPhone 3G activations through June 2009. And others have estimated 4m original iPhone activations (AT&T didn't always provide specific numbers during the first year.) And 3.2m more iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G activations in this last quarter, though only maybe half activated at the time of the August survey.
So comScore's estimated 7.8m iPhones seems way too low.
Fake Steve Ballmer – Will you shut up already? I know you're trying to promote your blog/satire, but it's getting annoying with 2 comments per post. I used to be an FSJ fan and don't even read that anymore. Go try elsewhere. Nobody here is interested.