For example, in the UK, Windows Phone has almost doubled its market share, from last year's 4.5% to 8.6%, while France's share nearly quadrupled, from 2.3 to 9%. For such a large growth the most responsible are cheaper models, such as the Lumia 520 and 620, which in the shadow of more powerful models slowly conquered the market.

Overall the leading operating system for "smart" mobile phones  is still Android by far, whose share at the five largest European markets were 69.8%, versus 64.5% last year, while the second, iOS, increased share from 16.2% to 18.5%. But in the U.S., the situation is even worse for Android, and their share fell from 52.6% to 51.5%, while Apple's iPhone has recorded the growth from 39.2% to 42.5%. These data are particularly interesting given that Apple did not present new models during the second quarter, while among the devices based on Android came a bunch of new models, including the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

It is also worth pointing out that in the U.S. there has been significant growth in the share of Windows Phone, from last year's 2.9% to 4.0%. Even though these are still quite small numbers for Windows Phone comparing to iOS or Android, it is good to finally see a positive change, and there is certainly nothing bad in having rivalry between several operating systems on the market.

[Ed - Coming on the heels of a $900 million dollar write down and the revelation that the Surface brand is losing money all Sruface sales are only about $853 million to date) we are not surprised that a number of aticles bragging about the success or movement in the Windows phone maket have popped up. Microsoft needs to try and turn any sucess into a staggering one. Sadly Windows Phone is still not a widley accepted phone OS even in the commerical market where Windows is the primary OS. No matter what Microsoft wants to claim at this point they are still in a single digit market share and are staring up at the mountain that represents Apple and Google. Still analysts are going to try and push their vision that Windows Phone will help Apple overtake Android by 2015. This prediction is about as realistic as the one that said Apple would hit $1,000 per share by 2013...]

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