According to new data released by Nielsen, the survey company best known for demographics research in the field of television, smartphones are now more popular with end-users than standard mobile phones. The survey, which categorizes users by active number of subscriptions instead of just adding the numbers on unit sales, showed that smartphones managed to edge out standard phones for the first time ever by a very slim margin.

The margin, which is 50.4 percent of all US mobile subscribers, shows a significant increase since the last survey. The last survey, which was performed in December of 2011, showed that only 47.8 percent of current subscribers in the market had smartphones.The research showed that smartphones were much more likely be owned by somebody and 25 to 34 years age range and two out of three of users in that same age bracket were likely to own a mobile device. Asian Americans were also more likely to have smartphone in their pocket, with 67.3 percent of users of this ethnicity reporting ownership. Interestingly enough, the research shows some contradictory data about which smartphones are the most popular with end users. Apple (News - Alert) was hands-down the most popular smartphone manufacturer, yet iOS only took up 32 percent market share. While the android operating system had 48.5 percent of smartphones operating systems running some version of Android. The difference may be accounted for by the fact that iOS only runs on Apple's iPhone (News - Alert), where as the Android operating system is used by a number of phone manufacturers. This has given the Droid, and other phones like it, the ability to compete with both the iPhone and each other with an array of features and varying hardware. Windows phones did not fare well in the results. Windows mobile phones only had a 4.1 percent share of the market and the Window phone had 1.7 percent of the market, for a total of less than six percent of the market.