Apple became the third-largest mobile phone maker in the United States in the first quarter, according to research firm NPD Group. With a 14% share of the US market, Apple is second only to Samsung and LG.

A leading US market research company has published the latest data on the US mobile phone market, taking into account the first quarter results of leading manufacturers. Thus, it turned out that Apple Corporation moved into third place in terms of the number of phones sold on the American market, displacing HTC, Motorola and RIM. So far, only Samsung with a market share of 23% and LG with a share of 18% are ahead of Apple. NPD Group analysts explain this success of Apple by the fact that since February, Verizon has also begun selling Apple phones, and not just AT&A, which has been an exclusive partner for a long time. Thanks to this, iPhone 4 further strengthened its position as the most popular mobile phone in the United States. In the first quarter, 18.65 million iPhones were sold worldwide, up 113% from the first quarter of 2010. Of this number, 2.2 million iPhones were activated by Verizon. In addition to the iPhone, the top five most popular mobile phones in the United States, according to the NPD Group, included the iPhone 3GS, Motorola Droid X, HTC EVO 4G and HTC Droid Incredible.

In its study, NPD Group also reports that for the first time, more than half (54%) of new mobile phones purchased in the United States were smartphones. However, not all smartphones were equally popular in the first quarter. So, while iPhone sales grew by 9% and accounted for 28% of smartphone sales, sales of Android smartphones fell from 53 to 50%. Moreover, this is the first case of a drop in sales of such phones since the second quarter of 2009. BlackBerry also lost ground somewhat: its sales fell by 5% to 14%.

Alena Miklashevskaya

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