Apple Inc. more than doubled its share of the smartphone market in the 4th quarter of 2008, according to a new report from Gartner on smartphone sales to end users. The company owned 5.2% of the market in Q4 of 2007, but sales of the iPhone 3G pushed that to 10.7% in Q4 of 2008, mostly at the expense of world-wide market share leader Nokia.

U.S. observers could be excused for not knowing that Nokia dominates the global market for smartphones, as their presence in the U.S. has been overshadowed by Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone, and more recently the not-even-released-yet Palm Pre.

In 2007, Nokia held 50.9% of the global market for smartphones, but while #2 RIM jumped to 19.5% and #3 Apple jumped to 10.7%, Nokia dropped to 40.8% market share in 2008. Nokia also saw its unit sales drop by 16.8% during the quarter, while the smartphone market as a whole grew by a record-low 3.7%. Apple's sales more than doubled during the quarter from 1.9 million units to 4.1 million units, while RIM showed slightly less growth from 4 million units to 7.4 million units.

For the year, Apple also claimed the #3 spot globally, with 8.2% on unit sales of 11.4 million iPhones. That compares to a 2.7% share in 2007 when the iPhone was first introduced on 3.3 million unit sales, which represents a 245% year-over-year growth.

Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor, 2008 (Thousands of Units)

Operating Systems

While a solid #3 in hardware sales in the smartphone market, Apple is only the #4 operating system vendor, again on the global market. Symbian, the maker of the self-titled Symbian OS that powers Nokia's N-Series of smartphones, is #1, RIM's BlackBerry OS is #2, but Microsoft's Windows Mobile is the #3 OS in the market.

Microsoft licenses its OS to a variety of handset manufacturers, where it cumulatively adds up to larger unit sales than Apple's iPhone, but just barely. The company's unit sales fell year-over year from 4.37 million units to 4.71 million units. As noted above, Apple sold some 4.07 million iPhones. Microsoft's percentage share was 12.4% compared to Apple's 10.7%.

For the year, Microsoft still saw its unit sales fall (from 14.7 million units to 14.6 million units), but its total market share for the year is farther ahead than the isolated Q4 results. Microsoft claimed 11.8% market share for the full year compared to 8.2% for Apple's OS X.

We should also note that Gartner incorrectly identifies iPhone's OS as "Mac OS X," when Apple designates the iPhone variation of the operating system as "OS X."

Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System, 4Q08 (Thousands of Units)