Survey: Apple's iOS rules European smartphone market with 45% share

While speculation builds over whether Nokia will adopt Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 in an attempt to regain a meaningful share of the smartphone OS market, a new survey claims that Apple has conquered Europe with its iOS platform holding close to a 45 per cent share.

While Google's Android operating system is growing steadily in popularity, according to information collected by StatCounter.com,  it still has only managed to achieve a 16.37 per cent share of the European smartphone OS market.

However, this increase has put Android into a very close position of gaining the No. 2 slot from Research In Motion's BlackBerry, which currently holds a 16.78 per cent share of the European smartphone OS sector.

Of note is BlackBerry's retention of a strong user base in the UK, with 36.22 per cent of the market in comparison to iOS's 42.02 per cent. Android continues to make headway in the UK, but has only managed to gain a 12.42 per cent share.

This data, which claims to be accurate until the end of last month, indicates that iOS is slowly losing market share - a 6 per cent decline since January 2010. By comparison, Nokia's Symbian OS is reported to have dropped by nearly half (from 23.25 per cent to 12.57 per cent) over the same period.

Separately, Europe's leading mobile operators are said to be privately hoping that Nokia will rule out any ideas of adopting Android, and instead focus on building the MeeGo platform into a mass-market smartphone OS capable of competing with the offerings from Apple and Google. The Financial Times reported that a major operator recommended Nokia to consider Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, if the handset vendor felt compelled to bolster its OS portfolio.

For more:
- see this Pocket Lint article
- see this Financial Times article

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