While Android is picking up steam with multiple handsets and carriers, data from Chitika suggests the Motorola Droid and Verizon Wireless still hold the biggest market shares.
This shouldn’t be that surprising, as Motorola’s handset was the beneficiary of the $100 million advertising campaign that led to more than a million units being sold. The Droid captures 33.5% of the market, while Verizon had about 48% of the Android users.
Additionally, the success of the Motorola smartphone shows the huge, pent-up demand for a cool handset on Verizon. Many Verizon subscribers had iPhone envy for the past few years but Big Red is quickly catching up. The Droid, Droid Incredible and upcoming Droid X and Droid 2 should bolster Big Red’s portfolio. I’m particularly looking forward to the X model because it will rock a huge screen, up to 1 GHz processor and an 8-megapixel camera (we’ll have some hands-on time with it next week, so stay tuned).
After Motorola’s smartphone, the HTC Hero was the second-most used handset with about 9.9% of the user base. This is followed by the Droid Eris (8.2%), T-Mobile G1 (8.1%) and the myTouch 3G (6.3%). The Nexus One has only been able to capture 2% of the market and the just-release EVO 4G is just about to pass Google’s own superphone.
In terms of the carriers, Verizon led the way, while T-Mobile held second place with 23%. Sprint was at 19% and AT&T only had 1%. Look for AT&T’s numbers to improve, as it only had the Motorola Backflip available at the time of this data. The mobile operator has just announced the Android-powered HTC Aria and it should have multiple more handsets by the end of the year.
Please note that Chitika’s research is based on its own ad data. This doesn’t paint a full picture of Android but it is still useful to see usage trends.
[Via Chitika]