Apple's iPhone was used by 42% of all U.S. smartphone owners in the fourth quarter of 2013, up from 35% a year earlier, according to an NPD Group survey.
By comparison, 26% of U.S. smartphone owners had Samsung Android phones in the fourth quarter, up from 22% a year earlier, according to the recent NPD survey of 4,500 adult smartphone users.
Globally, Android phones by all makers held a 78% share of the market in all of 2013, according to Strategy Analytics, which noted that Samsung phones accounted for about 40% of the global Android total. Apple's iPhone had a 16% share of the worldwide smartphone market, Strategy Analytics said.
For all of 2013, iPhone sales stood at 158 million worldwide, compared to sales of 783 million Android phones, Strategy Analysts said.
NPD also said that adults in its survey reported using fewer smartphones from HTC, Motorola and BlackBerry in the fourth quarter than they did a year earlier. NPD didn't disclose the numbers. Data usage per month per user surveyed increased from 5.5 GB per month in the fourth quarter of 2012 to 6.6 GB per month in the same period last year, NPD Group found. The biggest driver of the increase was increased use of streaming music services like iHeart Radio and Pandora, NPD Group said. A related survey of 5,000 U.S. adults from Connected Intelligence found that 52% of U.S. smartphone owners now use an app to stream music. Pandora is the most popular music site, followed by iHeart Radio, Spotify, TuneIn Radio and Slacker Radio, the survey found.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen, or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed . His email address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.
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