RESTON, Va. — Despite the country’s smartphone mania, only about one third of U.S. consumers over the age of 13 actually use the devices.
According to a comScore report, figures from the last quarter of this year show that 234 million consumers user mobile phones and about 35 percent, or 82.2 million, have a smartphone while the remaining segment of the market use feature phones.
The report also pointed out that most of the feature phone users do not use very sophisticated models.
Although 70 percent send SMS messages, other data services such as web browsing only account for about 40 percent of the users.
Less than a third use their mobile phones for social networking and games and only 20 percent listen to music.
But the research company noted that despite the weak stats, the numbers are going up.
As far as mobile operating systems are concerned, the study found that Android leads as a the smartphone platform of choice with a 41.8 percent penetration, indicating a 5.4 percent rise since the last quarter.
Apple didn’t grow as much, but held onto its second place spot with a 27 percent share that reflects about a 1 percent growth.
Research in Motion (RIM), Windows Phone 7 and Symbian all lost share with RIM seeing the biggest drop.