There are now more than 46 million avid “gadget” gamers in Western Europe, and Britain leads the league table by a surprising margin. Looked at another way, over 40% of Europe’s smartphone users are using their sleek new handsets for gaming, a phenomenon triggered by the success of Angry Birds, Farmerama and Draw Something. Gaming has now leap-frogged music as one of the most popular uses for smartphones.

According to comScore, mobile gaming adoption has grown 55% year-on-year. And the 46.4 million mobile gaming fans brings the market to a staggering 42% of all smartphone owners in the EU5 (as represented by the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy). Curious, we looked at past data in this area. For example, two years ago we saw where it was the French who led the mobile gaming market.

Here’s the country-by-country breakdown these days:

The social gaming growth trends are also growing impressively, this time with the Italians taking pole position. Here’s how comScore puts it:

In February 2012, 6.1 million EU5 smartphone gamers logged into a social game on their devices (up 42 percent in the past six months), representing 13.2 percent of smartphone gamers overall. The Italian smartphone gaming audience ranked first in terms of the penetration at 15.5 percent, followed by the UK (14.2 percent) and France (13.1 percent). Spanish smartphone users were most likely to play games with other people at 11.0 percent, followed by Italy at 9.4 percent.

And, finally, a breakdown of social gaming usage across Europe:

Editor’s Note: Join us on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012 for an in-depth discussion into the future of social gaming and mobile apps. We’ll be joined by an impressive lineup of speakers who have made a highly successful transition to the SO/MO/LO model.