Touch screens takeover smartphone market

Touch screen devices now account for more than half of all smartphone sales around the world.

Market analyst Canalys reported that 55 per cent of the 54.5 million smartphones sold in the fourth quarter of 2009 were touch-enabled the first time ever that the figure has topped 50 per cent.

A total of 166 million smartphones were shipped worldwide last year, including 75 million touch screen handsets, or 45 per cent.

The widening of the iPhone's network availability helped Apple to top spot in the manufacturers' stakes, with global iPhone sales of 25.1 million units.

However, rising strongly into second place was Nokia with 22.3 million. The Finnish phone giant launched a succession of touch-enabled devices in 2009, including the N97, N97 mini, the X6 music phone and the all-new N900 internet tablet.

The Canalys report showed Nokia's year-on-year growth as a whopping 4070 per cent, but that is mostly explained by the fact that its first ever touchscreen device, the 5800, only launched at the end of 2008.

HTC and Samsung were the next biggest sellers with 7.7 million and 4.8 million units respectively, while the rest of the market together made up the remaining 15.8 million.

On the operating system front, Symbian remains the most used OS around the world overall, with 78.5 million Symbian-powered smartphones touch screen or otherwise finding their way into the hands of consumers, just shy of 50 per cent.

Lining up behind were RIM, (34.5 million), Apple (25.1 million) and Android (7.8 million). Like Nokia's touch screen phones, Google's Android operating system also managed a huge spike of 1,073 per cent year-on-year, but likewise it only arrived towards the end of 2008.

However, IDC predicted last month that Android's strong growth would continue, and it would be a clear second in market share by 2013, behind only Symbian.