COMSCORE: Apple Has Nearly Double The U.S. Market Share Of Samsung

There are some caveats on this one which we'll get to, but Apple had a really good holiday quarter compared to its rivals.

comScore reports Apple had 37.8 percent of the U.S. smartphone market for the three months ending in January. Samsung, meanwhile, had 21.4 percent of the market. Apple's market share was up 3.5 percent compared to the three months ending in October. Samsung was up 1.9 percent.

Both Apple and Samsung took share from Motorola and HTC.

As for the iOS versus Android market share battle, Apple was 37.8 percent versus 52.3 percent for Android. Apple was up 3.5 percent, while Android was actually down 1.5 percent.

This is good news for Apple, but as we said there are caveats:

Apple does very well in the U.S. It does not do as well elsewhere in the world.

The holiday period was when Apple really launched the iPhone 5. Samsung, meanwhile, was selling the Galaxy S III, an older smartphone model. It only makes sense for Apple to experience a bump in this period.

We'll see how Apple holds up over the next three to six months as the hype of the iPhone 5 dies off and the hype for the Galaxy S IV cranks into gear.

All that said, considering the Samsung buzz, you would have thought it was killing Apple. These numbers show that Apple can still hold its own.

The bigger picture for Apple and Samsung on all of this is that the U.S. market, and other developed markets, is not going to generate the same growth, and thus profits in the near term aren't going to be as robust.