Samsung Tops Smartphone Sales: Gartner

Overall cell phone sales were down worldwide during the third quarter, according to Gartner, but smartphone sales continue to rise.
By Gary Krakow ,

NEW YORK (

TheStreet

) - According to the industry experts at

Gartner

, overall cell phone sales were down worldwide during the third quarter, but smartphone sales continue to rise. That's good news for industry leader

Samsung

, but not so great for

Nokia

(NOK) - Get Report

and its legacy lines of "feature" phones.

Samsung has now taken over the number one spot with 22.9% of worldwide sales, up 4 percentage points from the same period last year. Nokia is now in second place with 19.2%.

Apple

(AAPL) - Get Report

takes over the number three spot with 5.5%, up from 3.9% in the third quarter of 2011.

Number four, China's

ZTE

, saw increased market share with 3.9%, while Korea's

LG Electronics

suffered a drop in sales but remains in fifth place with 3.3% (down from last year's third-place showing of 4.8%).

Rounding out this quarter's top ten are

Huawei

(2.8%), China's

TCL

(2.2%),

Research in Motion

(RIMM)

(2.1%),

Motorola

, a division of

Google

(GOOG) - Get Report

(2.0%) and

HTC

(2.0%). All other manufacturers account for the remaining 34.1% of cell phone handset sales.

As for sales of units by operating system, Google widened its lead this past quarter. Android sales now account for a whopping 72.4% of all smartphone sales - up from 52.5% just one year ago. Apple's iOS is in second place with 13.9%, down from 15% last year. Research in Motion's Blackberry OS dropped from 11% to 5.3% in the third quarter, followed by Samsung's other smartphone platform, Bada (3.0%), Symbian (2.6%, down from 16.9%) and

Microsoft

(MSFT) - Get Report

Windows Phones (up from 1.5% to 2.4%) rounding out Gartner's list.

Overall, Gartner reports that nearly 170 million smartphones were sold worldwide during this year's third quarter.

--Written by Gary Krakow in New York.

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Gary Krakow is TheStreet's senior technology correspondent.

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