The tame Apple press wet themselves this week at a chance to give Jobs' Mob some more free advertising. Beancounters at Nielson issued sales figures which showed that Apple's 3G iPhone controlled five percent of the market making it the market leader.

Without looking too closely at the figures, the IT press in the US, which have been overly keen to promote Apple, ran stories about how it was Jobs' Mob's year and how the fruity gizmo was really a cure for cancer. However looking at the figures closely it appears that Nielson have cooked the books to make Apple's iPhone number one. For a start while Nielson have identified separate model ranges for LG and Blackberry it did not do this for Apple products.

For example the figures for RIM's market sellers are divided between its 8300 series, its 9530 series and its 8100 series. If you add RIM's percentages together you get 6.3 per cent, totally trashing Apple's four per cent. Rivals LG had its market share split between four products which gave it 6.4 per cent of the market. Apple actually had two versions of the iPhone available this year and if its sales figures were split in the same way it would be even lower. So Apple was the market leader... er right behind LG and RIM. But we were writing about Apple being wonderful... right?

We are not sure why Nielson presented its figures in this way. Certainly Apple being number one in the smartphone market appears to get more media attention than the somewhat duller LG, but market share has never been split up in this particular way before.

What the Nielson figures do say is that smartphones have been very popular in America this year. While Apple has done quite well it still has not managed to dent the lead of the likes of LG and Rim. It is worth pointing out that fairly close behind Apple in its figures was the ancient Motorola Razor range. Which is probably the least smart of the smart phone's out there.