"Smartphone sales jumped almost 16% in the third quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, driven by strong demand for affordable handsets in emerging markets.

"According to research company Gartner, a total of 353 million smartphones were sold during the period from July to September, with emerging markets seeing sales jump by 18%, compared with the third quarter of 2014.

"Samsung continues to be the most popular brand of smartphone sold around the world, with a 24% market share in Q3.

"In second place, Apple's market share grew slightly during the same period, propelled by strong sales of its bigger screened iPhones.

"Sales of devices running the Windows mobile operating system halved in the same period, and the OS was loaded on just 1.7% of new smartphones sold over the three months."

http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2015/1118/743526-smartphone-sales/

Ouch at Windows phone dropping 50% though. Lucky it's not a large segment of the smartphone market so the drop didn;t have a major effect on smartphone sales over all.

Android is 85%, WP is 1.7%. So does that mean iPhone, in second place over all is at about 13.3%? That means a whole bunch of manufacturers of Android fill up the 61% of marketshare with no one getting above 13%, which means Samsung still has an almost 2:1 advantage over any other single Android maker. How did Samsung manage to put itself in such a position? Their phones are no better or worse that any other brand of Android phone in the same price brackets. Is it because they cover all price brackets, whereas many other companies only aim at the high, or low, end?

Samsung make great phones at reasonable prices.... and it works.

Apple is all about the brand... its more so than the actual product, even if the iphones are great as well.

Is Android is still buggy as hell?

It hasn't been for many years.

Windows Mobile continued struggle isn't surprising. Windows 10 for smartphones isn't nearly ready yet, the recently announced flagship availability isn't set in stone, phone hardware business is officially & heavily scaled down. Samsung and other manufacturers are sticking to Android. It's just not looking good for windows phones.

Luckily, MS doesn't need to sell smartphones to survive, and with most MS apps now available on iOS and Android, there are less reasons to get a Windows phone.

Apple's iPhones continues to grow year over year, they have been playing their cards smartly and wisely when it comes to phones. I wish they cared more about the iPad.

Android is still the fragmented mess it has been since its conception, outside of Samsung, most manufacturers are struggling and barely making any money out of their smartphone divisions.

I have an iPhone but due to work have a lot of Android devices to try out and I must say.. Those Chinese manufactures are really getting there with their phones.. The oneplus two and Redmi Note 2 are powerful devices with great build quality for a lot less money then Apple, Sony or Samsung.. I think a lot of companies will drop out in a few years cause they don't have a chance against the Chinese.

How are tablets doing? They were heavily down in Nordic regions last year and laptops up again by a similar margin.

There are only 2 reasons for this post:

1. ignorance
2. baiting

Which one is it?

In terms of WP I am somewhat surprised unless this data doesn't include businesses. I know a lot of businesses and government departments use WP as their main phone OS, basically because their whole IT platform is windows based and it makes sense to integrate phones and tablets into the windows echosystem. only 6-ish million WP phones across consumers and business is very low. So either the consumer market for WP is actually dead, or business phone purchases are not being counted.

I have a WP for work and an Android for my personal phone. There's nothing wrong with WP, but there's also nothing that makes me think I would be better off with WP as my personal phone. And as a matter of personal preference I don't like the WP UI, even though it is functionally fine.

and i thougth we had reached smartphones peak sales years ago, so wrong!

Terribly "Tablet Shipments Decline -12.6% in the Third Quarter" http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25989015