Nielsen Tallies Up Most Popular Phones of 2009

By Geoff Duncan December 23, 2009

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Market research firm Nielsen has released its list of the most popular phones amongst United States consumers for 2009…and, no surprise, the Apple iPhone was the winner, capturing about 4 percent of the U.S. mobile phone market for the years. A close runner-up, at 3.7 percent, was RIM’s BlackBerry 8300 series. And in third place? The struggling Motorola, with its Razr v3 series capturing 2.3 percent of the market. The only other phone to crack the 2 percent barrier was the LG enV2, with 2.1 percent.

In terms of overall market share, both LG and RIM both beat out Apple, since each company had multiple phones series in the top ten sellers: RIM’s BlackBerry 9530 series landed at number 7, and the 8100 series captured the number 10 slot. LG had four phones in the top ten: the enV2 (above, with 2.1 percent), plus the LG Voyager, LG Date, and LG Vu series. In fact, aside from Motorola in the number three position and Samsung at number 6 with the SPH-M540 “Rant,” the top ten selling phones for the year in the United States were from three companies: LG, RIM, and Apple.

Nielsen also releases some statistics on the top services accessed by U.S. mobile phone users. The top Web sites were Google, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and the Weather Channel, while the top video “channels” U.S. mobile users tapped into were YouTube, Fox Interactive Media, and (yep) The Weather Channel. Apparently mobile users would rather look at a tiny screen to figure out if its raining than look out a window.

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