Nielsen has just released the results of a survey of new smartphone owners spanning the six months between January and August 2010, and if there's one thing to take away from the study, it's this: you people love Android.  Throughout the six months that the study was taking place, the number of people buying Android smartphones grew steadily, finishing in August 2010 as the most popular platform among smartphone buyers with 32 percent of the recent purchases.  BlackBerry and iOS are in a neck-and-neck race for second place, with 26 and 25 percent each.

During the same six month period, Nielsen took the time to study the total market share for the same three smartphone OSes, and the results seem to echo what we've seen in the past.  BlackBerry is still the king of the smartphone hill, finished August with 31 percent of the market, although that number dropped a total of five percent since January this year.  In second place is iOS with a 28 percent share.  Apple's OS fluctuated quite a bit during the study, but finished one percent below where it started in January.  Finishing in third place is Android, which snapped up 19 percent of the market in August 2010.  While Google's green robot is in last place in market share, the platform was also the only of the three to grow during the six-month study, gaining a total of 11 percent since January 2010.

Considering the plethora of Android smartphones, which are available on every carrier (including many regionals), I'm not surprised to see the OS being named the most popular among buyers in the past six months.  We've always known that new Android handsets were being pumped out quickly, but it feels like they're being launched at an even more rapid pace as time goes on.  Now that we have had time to digest Nielsen's numbers, I pose the question to you, readers: if you've bought a new smartphone in the past six months, which OS(es) did you pick up?

Via Nielsen