ANDROID 33% OF US MARKET; iPHONE UP

Android is continuing its rise upwards but has yet to take any share away from the iPhone, comScore found on Friday. February, the first month of the Verizon iPhone's availability, saw Android climb up to exactly 33 percent of the US smartphone field, a seven point climb from November. Apple's platform still managed to climb very slightly to 25.2 percent.

All of Google's advances came at the expense of every other platform, the research group said. RIM was hurt the most and saw its share drop below 30 percent for the first time, falling to 28.9 percent. Windows Phone 7 did little to stop Microsoft's decline and saw its combined efforts drop to 7.7 percent. HP, with the Pre3 and Veer still months off, dropped to 2.8 percent.

NETFLIX RELEASES ISP STREAMING DATA

Netflix has released data on how the top networks rank for streaming Netflix content. Coming out on top is Charter and Clearwire bringing up the rear.

To get a handle on which broadband service providers offered the best service to Netflix's streaming-video customers, the company compiled data from October 2010 to January 15, 2011. Netflix tracked the performance of customers streaming high-definition video over their broadband connections. A time-weighted bit rate metric was used to represent the effective data throughput subscribers received over many of the top ISPs.

In its study, Netflix averaged the performance of these network providers throughout their footprints. This means that Verizon's results include data about performance on its DSL network, as well as its faster Fios, fiber-to-the-home network. And AT&T's results include DSL, as well as its fiber-to-the-neighborhood U-verse service.

Rank of networks:

1. Charter
2. Comcast
3. Time Warner
4. Cox
5. Suddenlink
6. Cablevision
7. Cable One
8. Verizon
9. AT&T
10. BellSouth
11. Embarq
12. Windstream
13. Qwest
14. Century Tel
15. Frontier
16. Clearwire

BING PASSES YAHOO

Microsoft's Bing search engine has surpassed Yahoo, but is still a long way behind market leader Google, according to newly released data by Nielsen.  In August, Bing grew from 13.6% to 13.9% of the US market, while Yahoo shrunk from 14.1% to 13.1%.  Google went from 64.2% to 65% during the same time.

This is good news for Bing, however it is less rosy than it seems.  In August Yahoo and Bing jointly announced that Yahoo search was now powered by Bing, effectively putting Bing in second place.

Nielsen states it only counts searches that users type in a search box and not ones that are automatically generated by search engines based on the users browsing habits.  It should be noted that comScore, Experian Hitwise and StatCounter still show Yahoo in second place followed very closely by Bing in third. [Ars Technica]