A recent story published in the NYT painted a bleak picture of the future for smartphone makers Nokia and RIM, the developers of BlackBerry.

R.I.M.’s share of the American smartphone market fell to 41 percent in the first quarter from 55 percent in the previous year, according to Gartner. The combined share held by [Apple] iPhones and [Google] Android handsets rose to 49 percent, from 23 percent over the same period.

R.I.M.’s sales have been increasing outside the U.S. but the report attributes that rise to the sharp fall in the price of BlackBerry handsets. Here are the latest numbers (U.S. only) from Comscore.

Smartphone Platform Market Share

The changing consumer interest is also reflected in the traffic to these sites.

Google today released an updated list of their top 1000 sites that orders sites based on the number of unique visitors globally. It highlights  three key changes:

#1. Apple.com saw a 19% increase in unique visitors in the past month. The new iPhone 4 and the related Antenna problem may have also contributed to that spike.

#2. The number of unique users visiting Nokia.com and Blackberry.com declined by 12% and 16% respectively during the same period.

#3. HTC, the makers of several popular Android phones, managed to find a place for itself in the top 1000 sites for the first time though Google didn’t specify the percentage increase in traffic to htc.com.

Unlike HTC which launched EVO 4G and Apple which launched iPhone 4, neither RIM nor Nokia launched any major new device during that period so that’s one point that goes in their favor. I also expect Samsung’s site to see a boost in traffic this month because of their new Android based Galaxy phones that have won mostly positive reviews online.

Current Market share of Smartphone Makers

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.