Analyst firm Gartner today released their latest worldwide handset sales figures, including numbers for the first quarter of 2011 from all the big manufacturers. The headlines are that total handset sales have risen 19% year-on-year, with smartphones continuing to accelerate, seeing 85% growth since the same period in 2010. Smartphones now account for almost a quarter of total sales, with 23.6%.
Despite its financial difficulties and the lukewarm reception of its latest devices, Nokia still leads worldwide sales with 107.5 million units in the first quarter – over one million handsets per day  – with Samsung a distant second with 68.7 million sales. Interestingly, all of the major manufacturers lost overall market share in the last year, with the long tail of smaller manufacturers eating into their sales. Only HTC and Huawei saw modest gains of 1.3% and 0.1% respectively, while RIM stayed steady on 3%.
In the mobile OS stakes, Android continued to consolidate its lead over the other platforms, shooting up to a 36% share from just 9% one year ago. Nokia’s Symbian continued its slow march towards obscurity, shrinking from around 44% to 27.4%. It wasn’t all bad for the beleaguered OS though – Symbian sales actually increased from 24 million in Q1 2010 to 27.5 million this quarter.
The middling uptake of Windows Phone 7 continued, with only 1.6 million units being sold between January and March of this year, compared to 16.8 million iPhones and 36.3 million Android devices.
Gartner analysts believe the continued success of iOS and Android are due to their expansive ecosystems, which serve to “lock in” users – once a customer has spend $50 on apps for their iPhone, they are unlikely to move to Android as they will lose their investment.
“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform. This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google.”
