America's most trusted name in bar graphs, Nielsen, released an updated look at smartphone market share distribution today. The results aren't terribly surprising: Android is growing, and quickly at that. Blackberry's free-fall into the abyss has slowed to a steady death march. But what about Apple's fare?

Since the release of the iPhone 4 in June, Apple's total share of the smartphone market has increased by a paltry 0.7%, while Android has gained 10.8% more of the smartphone pie to reach 25.8% of the total - a mere 2.8% behind Apple, as you can see below.

Meanwhile, Android is outright dominating smartphone purchases made in the last six months, representing over 40% of all smartphones purchased since June. It seems very likely that the iPhone will be eclipsed by Android in the coming year if this trend continues, though a Verizon-bound iPhone 4 would definitely shake up the numbers to some degree.

We'll have to see how all this plays out in 2011 - with the emergence of dual-core Android handsets, Gingerbread phones, and Honeycomb tablets, this seems to be shaping up as Android's biggest year yet.

Source: Nielsen