I don't care to promote Apple—it does a fine job on its own. If you truly think that people like me are trying to rewrite history, you need to provide evidence supporting your claims. If you'll remember correctly (which only requires reading up the thread a few posts), I simply suggested that your unfounded assertion needed citation because the evidence simply isn't there. You gave a citation, but…it's rather obvious you didn't read the article you provided as supposed evidence.

There was an assertion (SGS3 is the most popular phone in the UK for the 7th month in a row). Not one place in the entire breathless article was a single number backing that assertion—nor even a link to the supposed source (uSwitch). Since it didn't, I decided to find out what uSwitch is, and look at its own site.

What I found, and what you deride as fanboyism and an RDF, is that the website is a dealfinder type of website. This doesn't make it an invalid source, but it does make it a skewed source unless it's pulling data from actual points-of-sale. I've done a bit more looking and there is a page that suggests that some form of the SGSx series has been the top phone in the UK for most of the last year (http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/mobile_tracker/).

I don't believe it to be true for all phone buyers in the UK, mostly because the current #3 phone is the Nokia 100. More than that, I also don't believe it because of the statement at the top of the page: “Take a look at the UK's most popular mobile phones this week, ranked by deal popularity and sales. Statistics are derived from uSwitch.com, plus our network of mobile phone comparison partners.” In other words, uSwitch is reporting phone popularity not just based on the choice of a phone, but based on the popularity of particular deals. It also reports no verifiable numbers (e.g., SGS3 sold 30k units last week, while the iPhone 5 only sold 29k units), but a private algorithm that includes deal search results.

I can see exactly where the supremely lazy “reporter” from the article you lazily (and uncritically) grabbed from Google treats this as a Big Deal for Samsung—but it's not. It's not verifiable and only speaks more toward deal discovery than actual sales reported by O2, Vodaphone, T-Mobile, etc.

The second article (that you pointed someone else to) is something else. It points to real data. It is verifiable. It's also something that I had already indicated was the case, and that is utterly unsurprising given that the iPhone 4S was down at least 3MM sales because of the availability of the iPhone 5 for just over a week at the end of CQ3'12 (the 5MM figure is the iPhone 5 opening weekend sales; the iPhone 4S was down about 2MM sales over the previous quarter, normal growth should have seen it up 3MM if there weren't an iPhone 5). So yes, in CQ3'12, the SGS3 outsold the iPhone 4S 18MM to 16MM. By another light, it still missed sales against the "flagship iPhone" by at least 3MM (21+MM combined iPhone 4S + iPhone 5 vs 18MM).

Then it goes off the rails into editorial rambling on facts not in evidence. The first couple of paragraphs were good, though. (It's interesting, though, that I can't find anything concreate about “Kirk Linsky” or “Content Works” that doesn't end up referring to these LogMeIn-sponsored articles on the PCWorld website.)