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Apple's strategy to take over the lead in the smartphone market from Android is working. In new numbers from research firm Nielsen, 37% of recent (within the last three months) smartphone buyers chose the iPhone, well above the 25.1% that did so in October 2011. Android still holds the market lead but the margin is beginning to shrink.

Android rose to the top of the smartphone heap by sheer volume. It has a plethora of original equipment manufacturers pumping out new devices every week that are distributed across the four major U.S. mobile carriers along varying price points. Why has Apple caught up? Well, because it now does that too.

A study from earlier this summer by wireless vendor Meraki reveals some starting information based on the data collected across their customers' networks. Apple's iPad users are piggy when it comes to their data consumption, averaging close to 200 MB monthly, compared to an average smartphone user of about 40 MB. They now account for four percent of all devices they have observed on enterprise networks.

For the first time ever, Android has tied with Apple's iOS platform in terms of mobile ad impressions on Millennial Media's mobile advertising network, according to its latest monthly report. Android's mobile operating system has seen rapid gains over the course of 2010, and has increased its ad requests by 2182% since January, growing at a rate of 65% month-over-month.

Android now has a 37% impression share, as does Apple's iOS, says Millennial Media.

Research firm Canalys released new numbers today on the mobile smartphone market, and they are impressive, especially when it comes to Android. According to the latest report, the Android platform has grown 1,309% since Q3 2009, going from 1.4 million handsets to 20.0 million by the close of Q3 2010. Android is now eating away at Nokia's top spot among smartphone OS vendors worldwide, where Nokia still retains a 33% share compared with Android's quarter of the market.

However, in the U.S., it's Android that's number one, with 43.6% market share lead.

Research analysts at Gartner have forecasted that Google's Android mobile operating system (OS) will become the second largest platform in terms of market share by year-end 2010. Symbian, however, will remain number one. Garner also notes that by 2014, the end of the forecast period for this latest market research report, Android will vie for the top spot against Nokia's Symbian OS.

Yes, Android is officially on the path to world domination.

Online tracking firm Quantcast has just released new data that shows mobile operating systems' current market share in North America, with the newly renamed "iOS" (originally called "iPhone OS" - the OS powering the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) in the lead...by miles. The Apple mobile OS dominates its competitors with a huge chunk of mobile market share, at 60%.

But don't let these numbers fool you. It's not how much or how little of the mobile landscape each OS has claim to, but how fast this picture has changed over the preceding months. The real winner here is Android, the OS whose rapid gains have come at Apple's expense.

According to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft's Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches.

Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, just published its first quarterly State of the Internet report. With over 350 million users worldwide, Mozilla collects a lot of interesting data and the organization decided to start sharing more of this data in these quarterly reports. Firefox's worldwide market share is now hovering near 30%, with Europe (39%) and South America (31%) leading the pack and North America coming in last (26%), even though it has the highest total number of Firefox users.

The growth of the Firefox web browser is one that's been spurred on by word-of-mouth referrals, volunteerism and community-funded advertising campaigns to raise awareness. Over the years, the alternative web browser slowly chipped away at dominant Internet Explorer's market share, despite its competitor's advantage of coming bundled with the Windows operating system. By January of last year, Firefox topped 20% market share and by December, it reached 22%. But now, that growth has stalled. Actually, it has declined a slight 0.18 percentage points over the past month. Meanwhile, IE declined by 0.60 points.

And what's to blame for these drops?

Earlier this week, Juniper Research published a report which said the market for location-based services (think mobile check-in games like Foursquare, social networks like Loopt, location-enabled apps like Google Maps, etc.) will bring in revenues of more than $12.7 billion by 2014. Spurring this growth are a number of factors, including the increased number of App Stores, handset improvements, access to high-speed mobile Internet and improvements to positioning technology.

While it's clear that location-based services are on the move, pinpointing a dollar amount to their market is a trickier subject. Has Juniper overestimated? U.K.-based consultancy Broadsight thinks so. "These numbers are way overstated," says firm co-founder Alan Patrick, who concludes that's it's far too early to tell the market's true size at this time.