The head to head battle between technology darlings Apple and Google in the smartphone market continued to hot up in the first quarter, with Google's Android operating system catching up on the iPhone operating system, though both still trail well behind market leader Symbian.

Latest figures from market research firm Gartner suggest that "smartphones" - mobile phones with advanced computing capability - accounted for 17.3% of all mobile phone handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6% in the first quarter of last year.

In the fiercely competitive smartphone market the open source operating system Symbian remains king of the hill, with more than 24m handsets sold in the first quarter having it as the operating system, up from 17.8m handsets a year earlier.

However, Symbian's market share tumbled from 48.8% in the first quarter of 2009 to 44.3% in the first three months of this year. The number two in the market, the operating system used on phones produced by Research In Motion (RIM), best known for its Blackberry device, also lost market share from 20.6% to 19.4%, though unit sales surged to 10.6m from 7.5m.

The iPhone operating system's market share improved by almost five percentage points from 10.5% to 15.4% in the first quarter of 2010, as the number of units shifted more than doubled from 3.8m to 8.4m.

Even the iPhone's growth was outstripped, however, by the soaring popularity of phones using the Android open source operating system (OS) that is sponsored by Google. Android supplanted the Microsoft Windows Mobile OS as number three in the market, with its share rising from 1.6% to 9.6%. Windows Mobile's share slumped from 10.2% to 6.8%.

The number of Android smartphones sold rose from a low base of 0.6m in the first quarter of 2009 to 5.2m in the first quarter of 2010, helped by the launch of the Google branded Nexus One phone.

In the mobile phone market as a whole Finnish company Nokia remains dominant, with a 35.0% market share, down from 36.2% in the first quarter of last year.

Samsung cemented its number two position with its share rising to 20.6% from 19.1%, followed by LG (8.6%), RIM (3.4%), Sony Ericsson (3.1%), Motorola (3.0%) and Apple (2.7%).

"RIM's mobile phone sales reached 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 per cent increase year-on-year," Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner noted, adding that it was the first time the Canadian company had featured in the top five worldwide mobile handset manufacturers ranking.

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