Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner)

Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share.

Remember, these are worldwide estimates. In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian. And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share. According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux. Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop 3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively. Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share.