Over half of US. mobile users own smartphone

More than half of mobile phone users in the United States are now owning smartphones, research firm comScore said on Friday. New survey results from comScore showed that about 119.3 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in September, representing nearly 51 percent of the total U.S. mobile subscribers who had both smartphones and non- smartphones. It marked the first time that U.S. smartphone penetration surged past the 50 percent threshold in comScore's study, the research firm noted. The latest study was based on survey of more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers. It found that Google's Android continued to rank as the top smartphone platform in the U.S. with 52.5 percent share, while Apple maintained the second place with a market share of 34.3 percent. RIM and Microsoft ranked third and fourth, with shares of 8.4 percent and 3.6 percent respectively.