Apple’s iPhone 5 regains the top spot in America

But elsewhere in the world Android is storming ahead

Apple has snatched back its lead of the US smartphone market from Google’s Android platform, though it’s at the expense of RIM’s BlackBerry devices and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. It is the first time since February [2012], when sales of the previous iPhone 4S were declining, that Apple has regained its No.1 slot in America.According to figures from market researchers Kantar Worldpanel, the September launch of its latest iPhone model more than doubled Apple’s US share of the smartphone market though the company still lags behind Google in Western Europe, China and Brazil.

Kantar’s figures for the iPhone 5 cover the six weeks to 28th October 2012 and it’s expected the picture for Apple will prove even more brighter when the next set of data is released as it will include 12 weeks of sales of the latest iPhone, including the vital trading period of Xmas.

Kantar paints a similar picture for Britain where it says sales of contract iPhones more than tripled during the week of launch, pushing Apple’s share of the smartphone market up by 5 per cent to 32.7 per cent.

Meanwhile, traded shares in Canadian handset maker, RIM, fell by 7 per cent last night [27th November 2012] as news emerged of its declining smartphone sales.

BlackBerry sales now account for a mere 1.6 per cent of the US market and 5.3 per cent in Europe.

Spain was worst hit where sales of the BlackBerry plunged from 23.7 per cent to 3.4 per cent, according to Kantar.

Wider availability of new Windows devices in Europe boosted the market shares there of WP8 players Nokia and HTC, particularly in Italy where sales went up from 2.9 per cent to 4.7 per cent.

However in Brazil and China, the world’s two fastest-growing smartphone markets, Google’s Android OS still dominates.

In Brazil the iPhone has less than one per cent share, compared with Android’s 56.7 per cent while in urban China, where the iPhone 5 has yet to go on sale, cheaper smartphones using Google’s software propelled Android to a 67.5 per cent share.

Kantar’s figures follow on the heels of another set released earlier this month by Strategy Analytics which said that Apple’s iPhone 4S had been overtaken by Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy S3 as the world’s best selling smartphone in the third quarter.

Korea’s Samsung is said to have attained the highest share of the Western European mobile phone market of any vendor, its 47 per cent beating Nokia’s 43 per cent from 2008.