Research company Gartner says worldwide mobile phone sales for Q3 2009 were up 0.1% year-on-year to 308.9 million devices, with the smartphone segment up 12.8%. The company says overall sales figures were helped by grey-market sales and financial pressure to destock. Fourth-quarter sales of mobile devices are expected to show year-on-year growth, resulting in overall 2009 performance being very similar to 2008 figures.
When it comes to smartphones, Nokia’s share of the worldwide market dropped to 39% per cent. This caused the market-leading Symbian OS to lose market share, while BlackBerry devices with the RIM OS increased to a 20% share. Apple’s smartphone share reached 17%, Windows Mobile slipped to below 8% and the Android OS had 3.5% share. [Press release; report]