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BlackBerry continues smartphone dominance across US: Myxer

While Apple?s iPhone and Google?s Android are getting the most buzz, Research In Motion?s BlackBerry has shown impressive results and rapid growth in the United States, according to Myxer?s latest BoomBox report.

This month?s report takes a look at year-over-year growth across smartphone platforms, providing a breakdown of RIM data as it compares to the overall Myxer audience of more than 33 million users. According to the study of Myxer users, RIM continues to far outpace Windows, Palm, webOS, Android, iPhone and Symbian based on mobile visits, growing from a 58 percent market share in March 2009 to a 63 percent share in March 2010.

?One major takeaway is how much of a stronghold BlackBerry has when it comes to downloading mobile content,? said Steve Spiro, vice president of marketing at Myxer, Deerfield Beach, FL. ?However, Android is a fast-growing operating system?more than doubling in the past year.

?We continue to see a steady decline in usage of both the Windows Mobile and Palm operating systems,? he said. ?And above all, the demand for mobile personalization content overall continues to be staggering."

Myxer is a catalog of mobile content comprising ringtones, wallpapers, videos, applications and games.

Smartphone battle
Looking at operating systems other than RIM, Android came in second at 17 percent, more than doubling over the same time period.

IPhone made a modest jump to 4 percent, up from 2 percent from the previous year.

Symbian and webOS occupy the smallest percentage of market share with less than 2 percent combined, while Windows Mobile was the biggest loser, moving from 21 percent in 2009 down to 10 percent in 2010.

Interestingly, the same holds true when comparing total downloads for the month of March 2010, where BlackBerry accounted for a 72 percent of the 22 million smartphone content downloads, followed by Android at 14 percent and Windows Mobile at 7 percent.

The others did not fare as well, with iPhone only grabbing a 2 percent share, Symbian a 3 percent share and webOS and Palm only representing 1 percent of smartphone downloads.

Regional breakdown
Looking at the regional breakdown of the most popular smartphone operating systems, RIM also emerges as the clear leader.

RIM is dominant in 44 of the 50 states nationwide, even when you combine Android and iPhone users for each state.

BlackBerry only loses to the combined iPhone and Android market share in Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky and Louisiana, with Nevada and Texas representative of "swing states," or less than a 10 percent differential in users.

Gender breakdown
In terms of BlackBerry downloads on Myxer, the BlackBerry Curve 8330 was the most widely used by far, accounting for roughly 4.8 million of the total 22 million smartphone downloads for March 2010.

The BlackBerry Curve 8320 represented the lowest number of downloads with only 384,190.

As broken down by gender, women were surprisingly dominant across all BlackBerry devices, with the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 having the largest concentration of female users at 70 percent, and the BlackBerry Storm 9530 having the highest concentration of male users at 46 percent.

Myxer?s core demographic is female users?57 percent of Myxer?s audience?between the ages of 18 and 24, representing 41 percent of Myxer?s audience. 

The operating system with the highest percentage of females is BlackBerry at 66 percent, Android is 60 percent female, with iPhone at 54 percent being the lowest.

From an age perspective, all the smartphone operating systems skew slightly older, with none of them having more than 7 percent of their audience fall in the 13-17-year-old age bracket, as compared to the overall audience profile on Myxer, in which 19 percent of users fall in this group.

Why do BlackBerry users download so much mobile content via Myxer?

?We believe the most important aspect as to why RIM has seen such a strong showing on Myxer is the fact that Myxer is the single largest source of both free and premium content?with over 3 million items?many of which are exclusive to Myxer,? Mr. Spiro said. ?BlackBerry users and Android users can come to Myxer and download content easily, unlike the mobile experience on iPhone in which users have to side-load content downloaded from Myxer.  

?We see Android as the operating system that is making the most inroads and we believe this will continue over this year and beyond,? he said.

?Not only is their relative growth impressive, more than doubling in the last year, but their absolute growth within the space is equally notable?up 10 percent year-over-year.?