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It’s no secret patent-related legal disputes have become the subject of most media coverage lately…Whether it’s Apple halting sales of Samsung’s tablets, HTC going after Apple, or Google snatching up Motorola to beef up their patent portfolio, it’s clear the company with the most patents will have an advantage over others in the legal proceedings that we’re bound to continue encountering down the road. This is why we’re intrigued by the graphic above (via GigaOM) from mobile analyst Chetan Sharma charting the number of issued patents (in the US and Europe) between 1993 and 2011.

While these estimates of mobile communications related patents don’t take the quality of patents into account (which is obviously a huge factor in determining their long-term value), you can see from the breakdown below that Nokia and Samsung top the list, with the other expected players including IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Motorola, and Intel following.

Noticeably far down the list is Apple, the one company who seems to have had more success than others fighting patent-related issues recently. Again, these numbers in no way represent the quality of patents and the ability for companies to protect their IPs in the courtroom… which is also a good indication that perhaps we should be looking more closely at the quality of patents rather than the sheer number.

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Research firm Nielsen chimed in today with a survey that puts Apple as the leading handset maker in the United States whilst Android is portrayed as the top mobile operating system in the country. Those findings follow a recent analysis which had Apple overtaking Nokia to become the world’s leading smartphone vendor in July, also corroborated  by IDC figures. According to Nielsen’s June data, Google’s Android remains the nation’s top phone platform with a 39 percent of the country’s consumer smartphone market. Apple’s iOS follows with 28 percent and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion continues to bleed share, down to 20 percent in the second quarter of 2011. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined grabbed nine percent, webOS and Palm OS were barely a blip with two percent, as was Nokia’s dying Symbian OS.

Apple on the other hand is the top smartphone maker in the United States that controls 28 percent of the market (excluding iPods and iPads). That’s partly “because Apple is the only company manufacturing smartphones with the iOS operating system”, Nielsen argues. HTC shares second spot with Research In Motion with a fourteen percent share of Android devices and six percent of Windows Phones for a total of 20 percent share of the whole market, same as the BlackBerry maker. HTC is also the nation’s leading Android and Windows Phone vendor with 14 percent and six percent share, respectively. No wonder Apple is suing HTC and seeking to ban import of their phones into the US…

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Nearly three-quarters of Android sales in Britain during a twelve-week period ended June 12 came from people upgrading from so-called feature phones to their first smartphone. In addition, only 1.8 percent of new Android sales came from iOS users jumping ship, a Kantar Woldpanel ComTech survey reveals. The research didn’t take into account corporate sales or contracts and was based on extensive interviews with up to one million consumers in Europe alone.

Android has grown its share of total US handset market to 9.2 percent in June of this year, up over just one percent a year ago. The platform had a 45.20 percent share of the entire smartphone market in the country, while iOS fell from 30.6 percent share in June 2010 to 18.3 percent share in June 2011. A big part of this was price: Apple’s is among the priciest consumer smartphones and only 45 percent contracts offer the device for free versus 90 percent for Android phones.

The fall of iOS came as a result of the overall UK market growing at a faster pace than iPhone sales, which have been overshadowed for the past two months as Samsung’s Galaxy S II smartphone emerged as the best-selling smartphone. In the US, Android and iOS had 57 percent and 28.7 percent market share last month, respectively. Android is clearly victorious in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and Japan, where the platform enjoys a whopping 64.7 percent share of the smartphone market versus 27.7 percent for iOS.

Kantar analysts predict that by this time next year smartphones would account for nearly 50 percent of the overall handset market, thanks to more and more feature phone owners dumping their devices for smartphones. This is not unexpected because trends hint that eventually all phones will become smartphones. Other phone vendors are experiencing sharp declines around the world, especially Symbian which has been bleeding share as Nokia fights for survival.

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While we’re at it, check out the sharp decline of RIM’s once powerful BlackBerry platform.

It’s always a good idea to take whatever analysts are predicting with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said,  Needham’s Charlie Wolf cites IDC data that portrays Android as losing ground to iOS in America. Android, of course, is the country’s leading smartphone platform which in the first quarter grabbed a whopping 49.5 percent of the smartphone market while Apple’s iPhone had 29.5 percent. The momentum cannot continue forever so it’s little surprise then that Android controlled 52.4 percent of the market in the quarter-ago period. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt calls this Android’s “first sequential loss ever in any region of the world”, quoting Wolf’s Monday note to clients:

In our opinion, this is just the beginning of Android’s share loss in the US. The migration of subscribers to the iPhone on the Verizon network should accelerate this fall when Apple coordinates the launch of iPhone 5 on the GSM and CDMA networks. The iPhone could also launch on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks.

It looks like ol’ Charlie’s trying to offload some AAPL shares. He argues that…
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