Nearly 42% of all US mobile subscribers now use smartphones, along with 44% of mobile users across the EU5 (comprised of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK), according to comScore report, entitled ‘2012 Mobile Future in Focus.’

The report also reveals that mobile media use, which is defined as browsing the mobile web, accessing applications, or downloading content, surpassed the 50% threshold in many markets, owing to the by the exponential growth of high-speed networks and increased public Wi-Fi availability.

comScore Mobile senior vice president Mark Donovan said 2011 proved to be a groundbreaking year for the mobile industry, with smartphones hitting the mainstream, tablets emerging as a formidable fourth screen, and consumers increasingly integrating mobile behaviours into their lifestyles.

"As mobile channels present a more personal, social, and ubiquitous experience to consumers, advertisers and publishers have an opportunity to better engage target audiences, given an understanding of how to connect and leverage the unique characteristics of these emerging platforms," said Donovan.

Android is just a few points short of capturing half of the smartphone market while iOS accounts for nearly 30% of the market.

Android saw significant gains in the EU5 too, as it edged past Symbian in 3 out of the 5 European markets.

comScore also said both the US and EU5 in 2011 saw the growth in mobile app use exceed the growth in mobile browser use, as both markets witnessed the same percentage of their mobile audience use both apps and browsers to access mobile media.

Health was ranked as the fastest-growing mobile media category in the US in 2011, followed by retail and other commerce-related categories such as electronic payments and auction sites.

More than half of the US smartphone population used their phone to perform retail research while inside a store in 2011, indicating the emergence of savvy smartphone shoppers who bring online shopping behaviours in-store.

At the end of 2011, nearly 1 in 5 smartphone users scanned product barcodes and nearly 1 in 8 compared prices on their phone while in a store, according to the research firm.

comScore said 64.2 million US smartphone users and 48.4 million EU5 smartphone users accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile devices at least once in December 2011, with more than half of these mobile social networking users accessing social media almost every day.

While mobile social networking users showed the highest propensity to read posts from people they knew personally, more than half of those in the US and nearly half in the EU5 also reported reading posts from brands, organisations and events.

The report also notes that tablets quickly rose in popularity in 2011, taking less than two years to account for nearly 40 million tablets in use among US mobile users and overtaking smartphones which took 7 years to achieve the same.

By the end of 2011, nearly 15% of US mobile users also had tablets, with other markets too following the suit.