Popular EU gadgets: iPod

Apple's iPod and iPhone rank among the top gadgets so far this holiday season in Europe, according to a comScore study designed to track the frequency of online searches. The firm studied 20 different models of gadgets from the game console, mobile phone, and portable music player markets across the UK, France, and Germany during the first three weeks of November. The study found that Apple's iPod is the second most popular item with 3.5 million searches, while the company's iPhone is the fifth most searched device.

"We know that music players, game consoles, and mobile phones are very popular with consumers this year," said Bob Ivins, comScore executive vice president of European Markets. "The interesting aspect of this study is identifying which products are generating the most consumer searches, which can provide retailers and manufacturers with important insight into the underlying consumer demand for each specific product."

The Nintendo Wii was the most sought after gadget across the three studied countries with an average of 4.9 million weekly searches. The second most searched for gadget was Apple's iPod, and rounding out the top five were the Nintendo DS Lite, the Sony Playstation PSP, and Apple's iPhone.

The iPhone was the most popular mobile phone in the study, generating 707,000 weekly searches to beat out both the Nokia N95 and Samsung U600 which both netted "substantially lower numbers of searches."

by MacNN Staff