• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, April 4, 2012

A majority of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. now use the Google Android operating system, according to the latest tracking reports from comScore. For the three months ending in February, comScore sees Android with 50.1% of the market, up 3.2 points since November. Apple’s iOS also increased its share of the market -- albeit less slowly than Android -- reaching 30.2%, up 1.5 points or less than half the growth rate of its major rival.

And the numbers add up to a two-company race at this point, since Android and Apple now control more than 80% of the market. Other challengers are seeing their share of the market continue to diminish. The troubled Reasearch in Motion BlackBerry platform is off another 3.2 points in the period, now holding 13.4% of the smartphone market. And Microsoft continues its struggle to make Windows Phone a realistic contender. Microsoft has only 3.9% of the smartphone market here, off another 1.3 points.

All categories of mobile content use continue to escalate, according to comScore’s sample of over 30,000 mobile users. Text messaging is approaching ubiquity, with 74.8% of all mobile users texting (+2.2 points). Digital content access is up across the board, with using an app and browsing the Web now done by almost half of mobile customers (49.5% and 49.2%, respectively). Digital content access by phone is on an especially striking trajectory, with increases in app use up 4.6 points and browser use up 4.8 points in a single quarter.   

Not all other categories of mobile data are also on the rise. Social networks now are used by 36.1% of mobile customers (+3.1 points), and 32.3% played a mobile game (+2.6 points). Finally, almost a quarter of users are playing music on their phones.  

Apple’s strong holiday sales of iPhones helped the company increase its share of the OEM market in hardware to 13.5% (+2.3 points) Samsung continues to lead the hardware market, however, with 25.6% share, followed by LG with 19.4%.