Smartphone sales on the rise

New figures from industry analyst Gartner show smartphone sales grew during 2009 despite overall mobile phone sales dropping 1% to 1.21 billion.

However, fourth quarter sales rose by 8.3% over the year, indicating the market is recovering from the financial crisis.

A number of companies have been hit hard, however. Motorola saw sales fall from 107 million to 58 million, while Sony Ericsson dropped from 93 million to 54 million. While Nokia remained at the top of the industry, it still lost 2% to 32 million sales.

Samsung and LG were the two remaining top five companies to record increases in sales. Nokia saw the Symbian OS drop from 52.4% to 46.9% in terms of market share, while iPhone sales increased from 11 million to nearly 25 million.