Smartphone penetration sits at 34% in US as 155 million stick to feature phones

A look at comScore's monthly mobile figures for the US deconstructed and expanded by asymco  points to a certain disconnect between the state of the market and coverage by the press.

While a sweep of mobile blogs and magazines would suggest smartphones are king, an analysis of comScore's latest numbers reveals Android, iOS and the like remain the junior partner in the relationship with feature phones.

Across the US mobile subscriber base, around 34 percent of the 234 million consumers own smartphones. The rest a total of 155 million are yet to make the leap from feature phones.

Growing pains

Of course, 78.5 million smartphone subscribers is by no means a small number, but asymco founder Horace Dediu estimates at the current rate, smartphones won't slip past feature phones until at least October 2012.

Nonetheless, the sector is growing as a whole 2.8 million new smartphone owners in the three month period ending June with Android gaining 2.2 million of those subscribers.

Main rival iPhone is also up 452,000 users, though this is actually down on the 1 million a month rate Apple had enjoyed for the last four months.

Opening Windows

There's even good news for Microsoft, asymco reports, with Windows Phone reversing the traditional decline following Windows Mobile's demise by adding 100,000 new users in the latest report.

Rival RIM, meanwhile, suffered a net loss of 600,000 users, while webOS also fell back 195,000 users.

[source: asymco]