Mobile phone sales down, smartphone sales up

no cellphones!
According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales are down about 6% from the same time last year; yet the volume of smartphone sales has increased almost 30% in the same time frame. No doubt the uptick in smartphone sales is due to the release of cool new devices like the iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre, and the various Android phones coming to market. As expected, Nokia remains king of the hill in terms of both regular and smart phones, though sales of their fancy new N97 have been extremely weak. Compare that with sales of Apple’s iPhone which enjoyed 500% growth in shipments! RIM is number two, yadda yadda yadda.

The whole announcement includes some pretty interesting figures for mobile sales. HTC is the number four smartphone manufacturer, while Palm ranks 10th, with just a little over 200,000 Pres sold. Microsoft holds 9% of the mobile OS market, slightly ahead of Android’s 2%, though expect those two to switch places by this time next year; and Symbian still holds 51% of the OS market.