Smartphones now make up 12 percent of the cellular handset market, but like everything else, growth has slowed.
In the fourth quarter, sales of phones like Research In Motion’s Blackberrys and Apple’s iPhone grew only 3.7 percent, according to Gartner. The pace was the product category’s slowest.
Still, 38.1 million phones were sold during the period – 139.3 million for all of 2008 – as consumers increasingly favored multi-function phones with Internet access.
According to Gartner, smartphones from RIM, Samsung, Apple and HTC took share in 2008 from Nokia’s more entry-level offerings. Nokia’s smartphone sales declined 16.8 percent in the fourth quarter.
The quarter also presented some difficulties for Apple. Sales fell from the third to the fourth quarters and the 2-million-phone inventory the company built up in the third quarter did not significantly diminish.
RIM’s Storm, T-Mobile’s G1, the first phone with Google’s Android software, and Samsung’s touch-screen products did well in the period. In North America, smartphones made up about 20 percent of fourth-quarter sales.
