A recent Gartner report suggests that Symbian is still the leader, ruling the smartphone market by gaining 37.6 percent share while its competitor Android has only 22.7 percent market share. The news comes on the tail of an earlier report, touting Android as the worldwide mobile platform leader.  What a turn of events this is, given Nokia’s pitiless woes as a falling giant in the industry.  Talking about the global mobile and smartphone market as a whole, last year witnessed a total in sales of 1.6 billion units, having an overall increase of 31.8 percent from 2009.

“Strong smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010 pushed Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) up in our 2010 worldwide ranking of mobile device manufacturers to the No. 5 and No. 4 positions, respectively, displacing Sony Ericsson and Motorola,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “Nokia and LG saw their market share erode in 2010 as they came under increasing pressure to refine their smartphone strategies.”

The total mobile sales were up 32.7 percent in Q4 of year 2010 as mobile phone sales to end users totaled 452 million units. Talking about the shortages affecting components like camera modules, touchscreen controllers and AMOLED screens as well as increased white box sales last year, Ms. Milanesi said, “This situation will not ease until at least the second half of 2011. Shortages will be a long-term consideration for mobile device vendors, because other fast-growing categories of connected consumer devices, such as media tablets, are competing for the same components.”

“What we see is an increase in addressable market for mobile device manufacturers as consumers shift their behavior to buying new phones from legitimate channels over second-hand and black market devices,” said Ms. Milanesi.

2009 sold a total of 1,211,239.6 mobile units while 2010 sold 1,211,239.6 units, which is really positive. On the other hand, the market share of major companies like Nokia, Apple, RIM and HTC fell from last year, while Samsung, LG, Motorola and Song Ericsson saw an upward move in their market shares. The report also informed the Symbian as the leader in Operating systems with 37.6 percent market share as compared to Android that has 22.7 percent share.

“Western Europe and North America accounted for 52.3 percent of global smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010, with smartphones accounting for close to half of all handsets sold in these regions,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Symbian OS is also used by Fujitsu and Sharp as well as in legacy products from Sony Ericsson and Samsung. “This aggregated volume kept Symbian slightly ahead of Android,” said Ms. Cozza. ”Android grew 888.8 percent in 2010 and moved to the No. 2 position. Android sales in the fourth quarter of 2010 continued to be driven by broad availability of many high-end products from HTC (Desire range, Incredible and EVO), Samsung (Galaxy S) and Motorola (Droid X, Droid 2).”

On the contrary, we heard Android outshining Symbian in Q4 of year 2010, as reported in a Reuters article. We heard Android taking a winning node not only in US, but in European markets too. Still, nothing can be anticipated for 2011, let’s just look for the next big thing of this year.