Apple doubled its share of the smartphone market year-over-year in the first quarter of 2009, according to a new report from Gartner obtained by iPodObserver.com. The report noted that cell phone sales slowed during the quarter, but that smartphone sales grew, and that application and service integration was a key driving force of that growth.

Apple's share of the smartphone market grew from 5.3% in Q1 of 2008 to 10.8% in Q1 of 2009, with Apple being the #3 smartphone vendor. Research in Motion's marketshare also grew, from 13.3% to 19.95, keeping the company in the #2 slot.

#1 Nokia was the loser in the marketshare game, going from 45.1% in 2008 to 41.2% in 2009. Nokia is the dominant maker of cell phones and smartphones on the global market, but the firm has been giving up steady share loss to both Apple and RIM's BlackBerry platform, especially in the U.S.

According to Gartner's report, the biggest factor in the growth at the high end of the smartphone market, where Apple competes with its iPhone, was the integration of both applications and services to the device. This is an area where Apple has been pushed the envelope, and in which the iPhone is largely considered to be the leader.

"'Touch for the sake of touch' was enough of a driver in the midtier space," Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement, "but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market."

The mobile phone market as a whole shrank by some 8.6% to 269.1 million units. Smartphone unit sales grew 12.7% to 36.4 million, with Gartner's iPhone unit sales pegged at 3.9 million units for the quarter. That represents just over 1.46% of the mobile phone market as a whole, ahead of Apple's stated goal of 1% of the market.