Android takes over but Nokia still sells the most phones

Research firm Gartner has just released their data for sales of smartphones in the last quarter of 2011 and to be honest it doesn't really hold many surprises. In Q4 2011 over 75 million Android smartphones were sold worldwide which gives them the dominant market share of 50.9%. This number is up from 30.5% in the same quarter in 2010. Apple's iOS platform had just under a quarter of the smartphone pie with 23.8% of sales in the last quarter of the year.

Unsurprisingly to many, RIM and Symbian have both had large market share drops year on year, with Nokia's Symbian dropping from a very respectable 32.3% to just 11.7% in a short 12 months. Although I should mention that Nokia still ships more mobile phones than any other company, shipping over 420 million of them in 2011. Samsung came second when it came to total mobile phone sales, selling 314 million phones; or nearly one in five phones sold around the world in 2011.

Samsung's alternative operating system, Bada, is currently scrapping it out with Microsoft's own Windows Phone platform to decide who takes 5th place. In Q4 2011 Bada holds just a 0.2% advantage over Microsoft. Although Gartner's analysts expect Window Phone 7's market share to jump to 8.6% by the end of 2012.

Smartphone sales also increased by 47% year on year going from just over 100 million in the closing quarter of 2010 to 150 million by the end of 2011. Total mobile phone shipments grew by just 5.4% in the same time period.

Kitguru says: It comes as  no surprise that Android is slowly taking over; there are now Android phones available to customers for under $100 while there are also models that exceed the capabilities of the iPhone.

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