Samsung has sold 50 million touch phones, Star is in the lead

Despite the recession, it's been a good year for Samsung, with increasing sales and market share, and it's been a good year for their touch phone division. Today Samsung announced that they've sold a total of 50 million touch phones - most of which sold this year.

Here's the breakdown. 10 million of those touch handsets are Samsung S5230 Star, which has only been out since May. This is quite as much as Samsung predicted when the Star reached the 5 million sales mark in August. It is still the fastest selling Samsung handset to date.

The number two spot is held by the Samsung F480 aka Tocco with 9 million units sold. This one got re-released a few times, for example the Rockstar and La Fleur editions, and even has a Hugo Boss edition. It's updated version is called F480i and it packs pretty much the latest Samsung TouchWiz interface.

The Samsung S3650 Corby despite being released only a couple of months ago has already scored 3 million phones sold.

The total comes up to 50 million touch phones sold, 40 million of which were sold this year alone (till the end of November). Compared with the 10 million last year, that's a quadruple increase. The percentage that touch phones make up of all Samsung phones sold also increased four times - from 5% to 20%.

Geographically, the breakdown goes like this - 19 million units in Europe, 6.3 million in the US, 3.4 million in China and 3 million in South Korea.

Samsung has set a goal of 200 million phones for 2009 and they are on track to overshoot that target. For now, their proprietary OS and TouchWiz combo enjoy a lot of popularity, but Samsung are getting ready to release a brand new OS, Bada OS, which promises a "next generation UI". Not many details about it are available, but the SDK should be released on the 8th December and then we'll know more.