Americans buy nearly 3 out of every 10 iPhones

Yesterday, I posted a quick stub about AT&T's contribution to the overall proliferation of iOS-powered devices for the last quarter: 3.6 million iPhones (both 3GS and 4) and an indeterminate amount of iPads less than 545,000 in total. AT&T's iPhone sales alone, I concluded made up 10% of all the iOS devices sold for the quarter.

One commenter complained that the article lacked context, and I'll give him that… But it was meant to serve as a single piece of a larger puzzle that will hopefully present a more complete picture of where Apple products are going, who's using them, and what it means to the mobile device market as a whole.

The next piece of that puzzle came on Friday, when Verizon Wireless posted its own quarterly results, which I will get to in just a moment.

For the first years of the iPhone's existence, many American users complained about having to subscribe to AT&T's "horrible service" just to use their beloved iPhones. The Verizon iPhone, it was thought, would be the magical solution to all of their problems, and also act as a springboard for Apple to take a larger chunk of the smartphone market.

At the end of the first quarter that the CDMA iPhone 4 was available on Verizon, market research group NPD said the device had increased Apple's market share by as much as nine percent, making it the third largest smartphone maker in the U.S., behind Samsung and LG. In its first quarterly 2011 report, Verizon Wireless said it had sold 2.2 million iPhone 4s.

In the second quarter, which Verizon Wireless just completed, it increased its iPhone 4 sales total to 2.3 million units. Though the company said there is "an increasing demand for internet devices," it did not break out its tablet sales figures.

So, out of Apple's 33 million total iOS devices sold in the quarter, 6.9% were the CDMA iPhone 4 on Verizon Wireless, and we now have the total U.S. iPhone impact on Apple's quarterly sales:

5.9 million new iPhones were sold under contract in the United States this quarter, making up 17.8% of all the iOS devices, and 29% of the 20.34 million total iPhones sold globally (as of June 2011, iPhone availability has expanded into 113 countries.)

That leaves 14.44 million iPhones to spread out across the "rest of the world."