Apple’s iPhone has taken a near 11% slice of smartphone market sales according to market-watchers at Gartner Group.
Just over 269 million mobile devices were sold in 1Q09, the analyst group has calculated, with smartphones putting in a strong performance.
Smartphone sales surpassed 36.4 million units, and accounted for 13.5% of all mobile device sales in the first quarter of 2009, a rise of 12.7% on the same period last year.
Overall, mobile phone sales declined 8.6%.
Nokia remained the world’s leading handset vendor, though its market share was down from 1Q08, as Apple stormed from to 5.4% in the same quarter of 2008 to its current 10.8%.
Gartner analysts said the positive performance shown by Research In Motion (RIM) and Apple showed that services and applications are now instrumental to smartphones’ success.
RIM managed to increased its share by 6 percentage points from Q1 2008 to capture almost 20% of the total smartphone market in the first quarter of this year.
