Slowing market
The not entirely unexpected bad news is that the global smartphone market grew at the slowest rate since Gartner started tracking it, although this still amounted to 11.5 percent growth.
In EMEA, overall growth was 14 percent with Apple taking second place ahead of RIM and HTC. Nokia was still the biggest seller but saw eight percentage points taken off its market share.
"The current economic climate is negatively impacting sales of higher end devices," said Cozza. "Going forward, we should expect the smartphone device market to continue to grow but at a slower pace. Although leading mobile operators are subsidising more smartphones, to reach lower prices they tie the device to two year contracts with monthly data plan rates which remain too expensive for the mainstream user."
On the matter of Nokia losing smartphone market share, Cozza said: "Nokia is feeling the pressure from increased competition in the consumer smartphone market. The company introduced solid Nseries products with top features, but its lack of a commercial touch-screen device in its smartphone portfolio prevented Nokia from capitalising from consumer demand for this feature."
"The recently announced N97 is a much needed evolution for the n9x series of products. It is unfortunate that the device will not be available before the first half of 2009 as this is a competitive product in today's market."
