Sales data for smartphones in the first quarter of 2012 was posted Wednesday by Gartner, and included some positive revelations for Samsung. The South Korean manufacturer sold 38 million smartphones compared to Apple's 33.1 million iPhones, and Samsung's share of all Android smartphone sales was more than 40 percent, reports BetaNews.
In contrast, none of Samsung's competitors managed to top 10 percent of Android smartphone sales. Samsung's 38 million smartphone units figure is a 25.9% year over year improvement from Q1 2011. Additionally, Samsung toppled Nokia as overall global mobile device sales leader, even when including sales of "regular" cell phones as opposed to just smartphones.
However, not all of Samsung's 38 million smartphones are Android, as the company also manufactures smartphones with Windows Phone and its own Bada operating systems.
According to Gartner's data, combined sales from Samsung and Apple come close to 50% of smartphone sales market share. And while some speculated that Windows Phone would emerge as a third dominant mobile operating system, it instead appears that the market will split mostly between Android and iOS, which took 56.1% and 22.9% of sales market share respectively. Microsoft arrived at sixth place with 1.9% sales market share, behind the Symbian (8.6% sales market share), Research In Motion (6.9%) and Bada (2.7%) operating systems.
Gartner's data represents actual sales to end users instead of product shipments.
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