Apple lead over nokia in terms of worldwide Internet usage on handsets.

Apple for the first time has toppled Nokia to become the leading smartphone in terms of worldwide Internet usage on handsets.

Finnish handset maker Nokia, which lead the mobile devices Internet usage market with 37.67 per cent share last year, has been relegated to third place this year with Samsung emerging as the second largest mobile vendor in terms of Internet usage.

"In January 2013 Apple led globally for the first time in terms of Internet usage with 25.86 per cent, ahead of Samsung (22.69 per cent) and Nokia (22.15 per cent)," the report said.

Last year Apple occupied second spot with 28.67 per cent share and Samsung was third with 14.84 per cent market share, the report said.

In India, Nokia still holds the top slot even as its share has dropped to 52.1 per cent in January this year, from 72.95 per cent in January 2012.

Samsung has shown improvement in Indian mobile devices Internet usage market and occupies the second spot with 26.87 per cent share in January 2013.

The third spot in the country is occupied by an 'unknown brand' with 13.17 per cent. Globally this unknown brand accounted for 10.95 per cent market share and occupied fourth spot. StatCounter report called in unknown as like other known brands as it could not gather information about mobile vendor and browser used in the device.

Globally, HTC occupied fifth position with 3.69 per cent followed by Blackberry.

Share of Blackberry globally declined from 8.3 per cent in January 2012 to 3.48 per cent in January 2013, the report said.

StatCounter said that it has excluded tablets but included all pocket-sized computing device for the research.

The global stats data in the report is based on over 15 billion page views per month to the StatCounter network of more than three million websites, it said.