NEW YORK—Nielsen reports that for the first time, a majority of mobile subscribers of all age groups own smartphones. As of the end of the first quarter of 2014, 51 percent of cellphone-owning adults over the age of 55 now own smartphones, up 10 percent from Q1 2013, driving the growth in smartphone penetration to 70 percent of Americans overall. (Please note that Nielsen originally said a majority of "Americans" have smartphones.)
As more Americans of all age groups adopt smartphones, we took an updated look at which handsets consumers are carrying. The majority of smartphones in the U.S. run Android OS (52 percent), and more than half of these were made by Samsung (29 percent).
But Apple remains the largest smartphone manufacturer, whose handsets are used by 42 percent of smartphone owners in the U.S. Meanwhile, Nokia’s market share doubled over the last year and overtook Blackberry as more recent acquirers of smartphone have chosen Windows Phone handsets, which now make up 3 percent of smartphones in the United States.
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