For the three months ending in February 2013, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) widened its lead over Samsung Electronics as the top smartphone OEM in the U.S. by nearly 4%. Apple now leads Samsung in smartphone market share by a total of 38.9% to 21.3%, a margin appoaching 2 to 1. The results come from the latest data reported by comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR).

HTC Corp., Motorola, now a division of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and LG Electronics saw their market share decline by 1.7%, 1.1%, and 0.2%, respectively, in the three month period.

Perhaps worse for Apple’s competitors, the Cupertino company’s share of the operating system (platform) market also grew by 3.9% while share for Google’s Android platform fell by 2%. Android still grabs nearly 52% of the U.S. platform market, but that is down from nearly 52% in the three months ended last November. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) managed a 0.2% share gain to nab 3.2% of the platform market, but BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) saw its share drop by 1.9% to just 5.4% of the total U.S. market.

The short version of this story is that Apple is crushing its competitors in the U.S. Total smartphone penetration grew by 8% in the U.S. during the three months ending in February according to the comScore report and Apple took half that growth.

Samsung’s deal with Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY), announced last night, is hardly likely to turn this around. For now, Apple remains in the driver’s seat and it’s putting its foot to the gas pedal.

The comScore report is available here.

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