Abu Dhabi, Dec 21 (IANS/WAM): Apple's iphone 5 is the most commonly used smartphone in the UAE, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has said.

The authority has released a report on the UAE's most popular mobile phone handsets, social networking platforms and application websites.

Between July 1 and Sep 30, 46 percent of handsets registered in UAE were smartphones.

In terms of smartphone models, the iPhone 5 was the most commonly used smartphone in the UAE, with 2.8 percent of such handsets registered on UAE networks.

Samsung SIII was the second most popular smartphone with 2.5 percent of the market share, followed by iPhone 4S (2.3 percent), iPhone 4 and BlackBerry 9900 (both 1.8 percent), Samsung S4 (1.6 percent), Galaxy S Duos (1.2 percent), BlackBerry Bold 9790 (1.1 percent) and BlackBerry Bold 9780 (1.0 percent).

The report said 56.2 percent of all handsets registered on UAE networks were made by Nokia, followed by Samsung (16.4 percent), BlackBerry (10.2 percent), Apple (7.8 percent), LG (1 percent), Sony (0.9 percent), Huawei (0.5 percent) and HTC (0.6 percent).

In terms of social media, visits to Facebook accounted for 91 percent of total visits to social networking sites, followed by Twitter with 8 percent of visits, Maktoob with 0.1 percent, and then LinkedIn and MySpace.