Sprint Beats Verizon As US Carrier With Most Samsung Galaxy S3 Web Traffic

Samsung has sold more than 20 million Galaxy S3 handsets to date around the world. Accordingly, the Galaxy S3 is the most popular Android handset and has eclipsed all other Android phones in the market. That’s in part because of Samsung’s aggressive, multi-million dollar global advertising campaign for the device.

It’s a very nice phone, but not the best current Android handset. That distinction, in my view, belongs to the LG-made Nexus 4.

In addition, in Q4 the S3 lost its position as the world’s top-selling smartphone to the iPhone. Below is a Strategy Analytics “shipments” chart showing unit shipments and corresponding handset market share. (Shipments is typically a dubious metric, but in the case of the iPhone and S3, shipments and sales are fairly closely aligned.)

Global Smartphone Shipments & Marketshare by Model in Q4 2012

Source: Strategy Analytics (1/13)

Ad network Chitika looked at the traffic generated by the Galaxy S3 and found that Sprint was the North American carrier from which the most Web traffic was emanating. Following Sprint are Verizon and T-Mobile, in that order. AT&T is fourth in Web traffic from the S3 among the four major US carriers.

It’s important to note that this traffic comparison doesn’t reflect absolute number of handsets at each carrier, but rather, the Internet traffic coming from those handsets. Sprint’s unlimited data plan is probably responsible for its “win” here.

I suspect there are more Galaxy S3 handsets, in real terms, at Verizon, but that Sprint users are online more because they’re not worried about exceeding their data plans.

The data above were collected by Chitika from “a sample of tens of millions of US and Canadian smartphone mobile ad impressions originating from the Chitika Ad Network, ranging from February 1st through February 7th, 2013.”

It’s widely anticipated that Samsung will introduce its S4 version of the Galaxy handset at next week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain.