Touchscreen smartphones sales rose twice, Apple still in the lead

The high-tech industry analyzers from Canalys have published a very interesting report about the touchscreen and smartphone markets in 2009. Apparently last year was the first time when more than half of all smartphones sold globally featured touchscreen functionality.

Despite being in the market with only two devices Apple is the leader in touschreen smartphones with just over 25 million devices sold and 33.1 percent market share. It did however face tougher competition than ever as Nokia sales rose an astounding 40 times to exceed 22 million units.

Samsung also had a pretty great year and more than doubled their touchscreen smartphone sales, but still lag behind HTC.

As far as the smartphone OS distribution is concerned Symbian is still a convincing leader, selling more than twice as the second best - RIM. Apple comes in third with its iPhone OS here but scores a huge 82.9 percent increase in sales and might just compete for second next year.

However it faces a more or less unexpected competition in the face of fifth-placed Android. The Google OS-powered devices sales rose more than 10 times year over year and seeing how recent announcements go a slowing down is highly unlikely.

We also have to note that the only mobile platform that saw its sales reduced last year was WinMo.

Some other interesting figures from the Canalys repots include the percentage of smartphone to feature Wi-Fi (84%), GPS (83%) and built-in keyboards (43%) - all of those being all-time records.

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