iPhone News Updated

Android stays ahead of iPhone surge in US (despite what Nielsen thinks)

Though the iPhone did incredibly well in the past three months in the US – getting nearly half of sales – Nielsen’s claim that it’s ‘catching up’ with Android isn’t quite right. Other platforms, meanwhile, have trouble

Nielsen’s claim that the iPhone is ‘catching up’ with Android isn’t quite right. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

“More US Consumers Choosing Smartphones as Apple Closes the Gap on Android” says the headline on the Nielsen blog, looking at sales of smartphone in the US over the fourth quarter.

Only one thing wrong about it: Apple isn’t, by the numbers Nielsen provides, closing the gap in installed base on Android. Instead, the Android OS is extending its lead in smartphones – which, according to Nielsen, stands at 46.3% of the total market; Apple, it says, has 30% of the overall market.

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Apple earnings preview: It’s all about the iPhone 4S

Apple reports its first-quarter earnings tomorrow, and Wall Street’s expecting some record-breaking numbers all around.

Analysts polled by FactSet predict the company will bring in earnings of $10.04 per share and revenue of $38.92 billion. As usual, that’s well above the $9.30 a share on $37 billion Apple forecasted at the end of its last quarter.

There will be a lot to chew on with tomorrow’s numbers, which should come in shortly after the close of trading. But the big one to look at is how many iPhones the company sold.

This is the first quarter to include sales of the iPhone 4S, which hit shelves in mid-October. All indications have been that it’s Apple’s best-selling phone yet, though the company has not provided new data on that since boasting sales of 4 million iPhone 4S units in its first weekend.

Fortune scooped together a collection of 22 estimates from Wall Street analysts, who averaged a guess of 29.74 million iPhones sold. How does that stack up to the same quarter last year? Apple sold 16.24 million units, which in itself was an 86 percent increase year over year. If Apple met the near-30 million estimate for this quarter, that would be about an 83 percent increase this time around.

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