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Android, Apple lead U.S. smartphone market, others play catch-up

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The Android operating system’s share of smartphone sales grew to 53% from January through October, up from 42% in 2010, and Apple’s iOS share rose to 29%, up from 21% last year, research firm NPD Group said Tuesday.

Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, continued to see its share of the smartphone market decline, plummeting to 10% in the first 10 months of this year. In 2010, it held one-fourth of the market.

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Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Symbian OS and Palm/webOS had tiny shares of the market, with each operating system capturing no more than 3%.

‘The competitive landscape for smartphones, which has been reshaped by Apple and Google, has ultimately forced every major handset provider through a major transition,’ said Ross Rubin, executive director of Connected Intelligence at the NPD Group. ‘For many of them, 2012 will be a critical year in assessing how effective their responses have been.’

Motorola is seeking to rebuild its share of the market, which was 36% five years ago but had fallen as low as 1% in the third quarter of 2009. After adopting Android, Motorola rose to 16% of the market in the fourth quarter last year but fell to 12% in the third quarter this year. But Rubin said Motorola is at least back in the game.

Another smartphone maker hoping to rebound next year is RIM. Rubin said few companies ‘have felt the impact of the shift to touch user interfaces and larger screen sizes as negatively,’ but noted that the company is beginning anew with a strong technical foundation and has already made incremental improvements this year with the release of its BlackBerry 7 operating system. In the second quarter of 2006, RIM held half of all smartphone sales, but by the third quarter this year, it had fallen to 8%.

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-- Andrea Chang

twitter.com/byandreachang

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