All things must pass and so to have feature phones yielded to the global smartphone trend. As new Gartner numbers point out, worldwide smartphone sales for the second quarter have beaten out feature phone sales for the first time ever.
Of the 435 million handsets sold in the quarter, smartphones accounted for 225 million, up 46.5 percent annually. Feature phones accounted for the remaining 210 million, representing a 21-percent decrease annually.
Gartner pointed out that the 51.6 percent share of the market smartphones took was partly due to high smartphone growth rates in the Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe markets.
Unsurprisingly, Android dominated by controlling a mind-boggling 79 percent of the global smartphone market. Most of what was left belonged to iOS (14.2 percent), but Windows Phone jumped ahead of BlackBerry to snag 3.3 percent of the market.
The Windows Phone gains are good news for partner Nokia, but the decline in feature phone demand partially lead to Nokia selling 61 million handsets in the quarter, down from 83 million in the same quarter last year.
Filed Under: Devices
