Worldwide smartphone sales: who were the big sellers in 2009?

Accompanied by a flurry of flapping flipcharts and clicking ballpoint pens, tech stat fiends Gartner have just unleashed their annual figures for worldwide mobile phone sales to end users.

Smartphone gain and losses

In the smartphone segment, Gartner shows the iPhone OS (14.4% market share), Android (3.9%), and RIM (19.9%) operating systems making the biggest gains in 2009, scoring percentage point gains of 6.2, 3.4, and 3.3 percentage points from 2008, respectively, with the share for the doomed Windows Mobile platform slip slidin’ down by 3.1%.

Symbian fares even worse, with its smartphone sales crashing by 5.5%, prompting an unimpressed Gartner to comment that the Nordic mobile overlords have, “become uncompetitive in recent years.”

That said, the Gartner guys’n’gals admit that Symbian’s market share is still mighty strong especially for Nokia – a fact backed up Nokia’s healthy results for the last quarter of 2009, which saw them grab a bigger slice of the smartphone pie (if such a thing existed – and if it did, we suspect it wouldn’t be too tasty).

In fifth place is Linux with a 4.7% market share (down from 7.6%), and a fast-growing Android wh daw 2008’s 0.5% share rise to 3.9%,

Yapping at the heels is the fledgling webOS – still our favourite mobile OS, by the way – with a 0.7% market share and rising.

All phone totals

When ot comes to totting up all the phones sold over 2009. Nokia retained their vice-like control on the market albeit with some slipping, bagging 36.4% of all sales to end users (down from 38.6% in 2008), followed by a sprightly Samsung (19.5%), LG (10.1%), Motorola (4.8%) and Sony Ericsson (4.5%).

“The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner.

”Smartphone sales to end users continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, totalling 53.8 million units, up 41.1 per cent from the same period in 2008.

In 2009, smartphone sales reached 172.4 million units, a 23.8 per cent increase from 2008. In 2009, smartphone-focused vendors like Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) successfully captured market share from other larger device producers, controlling 14.4 and 19.9 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market, respectively.”

[Gartner]