Counterpoint Study: 87 Percent of American Handsets are Smartphones

The smartphone is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous object in the United States, according to word from Counterpoint's “Market Monitor”. The first quarter word from the regular Counterpoint study showed that not only is the smartphone a major part of the American landscape, but its use is actually still growing, and along with that information came new revelations about just which smartphones are being purchased, what network said phones are being used on, and many more items besides.

The Counterpoint study showed that growth in the smartphone market was actually up seven percent over the same time last year, allowing us to reach the point that fully 87 percent of Americans are now packing smartphones. Most of those smartphones, meanwhile, are Apple's, with Apple being the top phone used at AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Only T-Mobile was different in terms of the major carriers, with Samsung being the most frequently used on that network. Apple devices held 36.9 percent of phones sold in the United States in the first quarter of 2014, while Android devices—which contains several brand names therein—held 59.2 percent of sales. Windows Mobile came in third at 3.6 percent, and BlackBerry rounded out the figures with just 0.3 percent of total sales. Meanwhile, most of the devices sold took advantage of LTE connectivity, with fully three out of four devices packing the service, and among those devices, 70 percent could be accounted by the combination of Apple and Samsung.

Similar data recently emerged to offer support for Counterpoint's findings, including comScore's MobiLens report that suggested Apple sold 39 percent of all smartphones for the first quarter of 2014, which in turn represented 2.7 percent growth for the quarter in U.S market share. Canaccord Genuity and Chitika Insights both brought in similar measures of Apple's success in the United States markets.

It's been something of a race for third place for some time now in the United States mobile device market. Apple has been on top, with Samsung not far behind and everyone else struggling for that third place slot. It was a prospect that Microsoft had to overcome when it first planned to release Windows Phone devices, and one that it at least somewhat seems to have overcome. While smartphone buyers in the United States do indeed have plenty of choices, most people's choices seem to boil down to something from Apple or something from Samsung. There are plenty of other options, but these options seem to be largely ignored in favor of the hardware from the major two providers. Have Apple and Samsung done the job so well that there's little room for competition? Is the marketing from these two companies simply superior? There's likely something to this concept, as I can't remember an HTC or Huawei commercial of late, but Samsung and Apple are quite well in attendance.

Whether it's the marketing, the engineering, or just some kind of group-think at work doesn't particularly matter; the key point here is that, for smartphones in America, it's largely a two-horse race. Those who want to get in on the action, meanwhile, need to figure out how to either out-Apple or beat Samsung at its own game to get a significant portion of market share in the United States.