Nielson data: Apple takes 4% of US cell phone market. That isn’t much.

Notice that title is a bit different than what you are seeing around the Web?  Everyone is giving this story an extremely positive slant towards Apple, but it just isn’t so.  Even in the PC marketplace, the Mac has more than 4% of the US market, yet everyone getting excited because Nielson is presenting their data in a way that makes Apple’s iPhone the tops for 2009.

To start getting excited, you want to wait until the iPhone starts putting up numbers like iPod, which consistently surpasses 70% of the MP3 market.

First of all, they are counting the iPhone 3G and 3GS as one device.  They are also counting the different configurations 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, etc. as one device even though they have significantly different costs.  All of that isn’t a problem except they don’t group all of the other handset makers’ devices the same way.  If they had, just the four LG phones on Nielsen’s  top 10 list would have beat Apple by over 50%. Blackberry would have beat them by more than 50% too.

Yet, four percent isn’t bad, especially since Apple is only two and a half years into selling these things (and only was after 1% for the first year) and ‘dumb phones’ like Motorola’s RAZR still outsell smartphones by a significant margin.  

But to say that the iPhone is the best selling device, you have to play with the numbers.