The research comes courtesy of Kantar Worldpanel, which found that 71.4 percent of British mobile phone sales were smartphones during Q4 of 2011.
‘Over half of the British population (50.3 per cent) now owns a smartphone,’ claimed the report.
Apple’s iPhone 4S accounted for 29.1 per cent of the UK smartphone market, making up almost one quarter of all smartphone sales in November and early December.
‘Android holds on to its lead but Apple is making inroads, increasing its share of the British market from 21.7 per cent a year ago to 29.1 per cent now, said Consumer Insight Director Dominic Sunnebo.
He added: ‘The jump we saw in Apple’s share last period was clearly not just a blip caused by the iPhone 4S release. Although the majority of growth is coming from the new handset, Apple’s latest pricing structure is also working in its favour with no discernable drop in sales of older iPhone 4 and 3GS models.’
Kantar expects Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform to grow by around eight per cent by the end of 2012, following the release of a new handsets after MWC 2012 and the arrival of the Windows Phone Tango and Apollo updates.
‘It seems that the Lumia 800 release has helped Nokia to maintain its customer loyalty,’ says Kantar, ‘albeit at a slower rate than it might wish for, with over a quarter of Windows Phone 7 customers having owned Symbian handsets in the past.’
