Report: iPhone 5 launch slows Android's U.S. sales growth

First-week sales of Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) new iPhone 5 slowed the growth of rival Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android mobile operating system in the critical U.S. and U.K. markets, according to a new report issued by market research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Apple released the iPhone 5 to American and British consumers on Sept. 21. As of Sept. 30, the end of the third quarter, smartphones running iOS accounted for 35.7 percent of U.S. sales, up from 21.5 percent in the year-ago period--during the same timeframe, Android sales slipped from 66.4 percent to 57.5 percent. In the U.K., iOS increased from 18.1 percent smartphone sales share in the third quarter of 2011 to 28 percent a year later, while Android posted smaller gains, rising from 53.4 percent to 58.2 percent.

"While this latest data set only includes one week of iPhone 5 sales, we can see that in markets with a large number of existing Apple customers, sales have already seen a significant boost," said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

It's a different story across Europe as a whole, however: Android's sales share increased from 50.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011 to 67.1 percent this year, while iOS fell from 17.3 percent to 16.5 percent.

Kantar adds that Research In Motion's (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry operating system plummeted from 6.9 percent of U.S. sales in the third quarter of 2011 to just 2.1 percent a year later. Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone enjoyed a small year-over-year increase from 2.7 percent to 2.9 percent, while Symbian accounted for a mere 0.3 percent of U.S. sales, down from 0.7 a year ago.

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