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Windows Phone beats BLACKBERRY in mobe OS popularity stakes

Apple and Samsung still waaaay ahead, though

The difference is small, and they are both way behind the leaders, but online data analytics specialists comScore have reported that while usage of Windows Phone stayed steady as a rock at 3.2 per cent, BlackBerry slipped half a percent down at 3.1 per cent.

This puts Windows in third place, behind Apple (at 41.7 per cent) and Android (51.7 per cent). The figures are for January and only cover US smartphone use. Not moving is hardly anything for Microsoft to crow about and it's still bobbing along in third place.

The comScore figures also give device manufacturer league tables looking at market shares for the three months to the end of January as compared with the three months to the end of October.

The chart shows, in top spot, Apple rising from 40.6 per cent to 41.6 per cent, Samsung second with 26.7 PER CENT but with the biggest gain of 1.3 per cent, LG, despite desperate recent financials overtaking Motorola and HTC to grab third spot at 6.9 per cent Google's Lenovo's Motorola at 6.4 per cent down 0.6 per cent and HTC plummeting 1.3 per cent to 5.4 per cent.

The company only tracks online usage so comScore's figures don't reflect all those hours spent playing Flappy Bird. Indeed, games don't make the top 15 of the apps. Facebook reigns supreme as the top mobile app and second only to Google in visited websites.

Still, Google holds its own, being the top site with 89.4% of smartphone users visiting, and Google Play is in second place for the apps, well ahead of iTunes - although this is visited by pretty much every iPhone user.

What's notable is that even in the carrier dominated US, none of the US carriers own sites make the top 15 while Microsoft and Apple come in at 6th and 7th place respectively. The OTT scenario that the operators feared is alive and well.

A surprising omission from the list is Spotify, with Americans preferring to listen to Pandora.

And for those of us who thought it was only the British who obsess about the weather, it's instructive to note that The Weather Channel features in both the top 15 sites and apps, although given what the weather was doing in the American mid-west in the three months up to the end of January, perhaps it's not so surprising. ®

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