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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.

The perception among younger adults is that everybody owns a smartphone. When numbers like 50% of U.S. cellphone owners have apps, the reaction inevitably comes, "only 50%?" It is easy for adults, say those from 25-44 years old, to forget that there is a significant portion of the U.S. population that does not own cellphones, let alone those of the smart variety. Mobile penetration in the United States is at 77%, which lags behind many other developed countries.

Nielsen came out with its third quarter mobile numbers today and the demographics are intriguing. The reason that young people feel like everybody has smartphones is because they do. 62% of people 25-34 years old have smartphones. Of all cellphones in the U.S., 43% of them are smart.

Google and Nielsen measured the impact of advertising across multiple screens, and the findings were stark. Advertisers will be happy to learn that advertising across devices appears to significantly increase brand retention by eyeballs... I mean, people.

The study tested a 15-second car ad on different subject groups. Some saw no ads, others saw them on various combinations of TV, PCs, smartphones and tablets. Those who saw the ad on TV alone recalled the brand of car correctly 50% of the time. The people who saw it across all devices got it right 74% of the time.

According to new research from analytics firm Nielsen, most Android users spend more time with native mobile applications than they do on the mobile Web. The average Android user spends 56 minutes per day actively interacting with the Web and apps on their devices. Of that, nearly 67% is done through native applications.

The most popular offerings take up the lion's share of time spent. We are not just talking the top 1,000 apps of the more than 250,000 Android apps available. The top 50 apps end up taking 61% of users' time, according to Nielsen. That means that most users are spending most of their time playing Angry Birds and listening to Pandora (for example) than interacting with niche services. The stakes in for developers to create top-end apps that consumers will actually use has never been higher.

Despite all the hullabaloo about the ascendancy of Web video and predictions about the demise of cable, Americans still watch a lot of television. Those are the findings, at least, from the latest study by Nielsen. And even with all the various ways people can now consume video, Americans' intake of "traditional" TV is still the dominant source for most viewers. Furthermore, this viewership has increased by 22 minutes per month per person over the last year.

That being said, mobile video continues to see substantial increases in viewership, up over 41% from last year and more than 100% since 2009. Internet video streaming is also on the rise.

The Nielsen Company's latest research, released today, into consumers thoughts on their privacy and their location data seems well timed in light of yesterday's news that iPhones contain a hidden file that chronicles users' movements. And no surprise - even without knowing about this recent revelation of the potential for iPhone tracking - most consumers responding to the Nielsen survey said they are concerned about the implications of sharing their location via their mobile phones.

59% of women and 52% of men say that they have privacy concerns when it comes to the apps they download onto their smartphones. Those older than 45 were the most concerned about their privacy, while those between the ages of 25 and 34 were the least concerned.

Apple is still the U.S. market share leader when in comes to smartphone operating systems, according to new data revealed today by Nielsen, but just barely. In fact, its lead is so tenuous, that the margin of error on Nielsen's report places second-place platform RIM BlackBerry in a statistical tie for both Apple's top spot and the third place spot now occupied by Google's Android.

Says Nielsen, "this race might still be too close to call."

While there has been a lot of talk about cord cutting lately - that is, cancelling your cable subscription in favor of going Internet TV-only - a new study by Nielsen, commissioned by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) found that only 11% of the U.S. population currently watches "some TV shows and movies from the Internet on their TV sets." The vast majority of these Internet TV viewers (84%) say that they are still watching the same amount of traditional TV as before and have no plans to cancel their current cable subscriptions.

Yesterday, we reported that Nielsen Online's April numbers showed that the number of unique streams on Hulu grew 7.9% since March, though the number of unique users dropped slightly to about 7.4 million. As the New York Times reports this morning, however, Hulu questions these numbers and argues that they grossly underestimate Hulu's real reach, which comScore, another online measurement firm, pegs at 42 million.

CenterNetworks reported yesterday on the launch of the new TotalWeb tracking service from Nielsen, which includes mobile traffic along with desktop PC traffic in its measurement of top Internet properties. When including mobile traffic, says Nielsen, top Internet sites can extend their reach an average of 13%. Though TotalWeb only covers about "200 leading Internet sites" (ironic for a product called TotalWeb), the data is nonetheless interesting.