I was digging around for some recent market share numbers and came across some numbers by analyst firm IDC.

Overall, the industry growth has slowed, and they expect the slower growth rate to continue:

“Over the last three years, growth in the industry during the holiday quarter has fluctuated from 18.0% to 30.0%, and this past quarter we saw it drop to 11.6%,” said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. “The expectation that the market would maintain the level of growth it saw over the last three years was unrealistic. We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008, and most likely for years to follow.”

Though overall growth slowed, mobile web use is starting to make some dents. The iPhone and S60 are in a battle to lay down the most logs on webservers, according to the NYTimes and Google:

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.

There’s an interesting bit about Samsung in the IDC report. They managed to snag the number two spot from Motorola, who have been stagnating, riding that RAZR/ROKR/etc. line and operating system out for way too long at this point:

Samsung achieved several noteworthy accomplishments to end 2007: It took the No. 2 position worldwide for the year, posted its third consecutive quarter as the No. 2 vendor worldwide, and recorded its sixth consecutive quarter of shipment growth.

I’m rooting for Samsung. In the US, they’ve released some solid hits with the Blackjack and Juke in the US and they have more handset models than I can count released internationally. All of them are pretty decent too, and they stack right up there with HTC and UTStarcomm with their Windows Mobile implementations.

But Nokia continues to reign supreme interntaionally:

Nokia shipped more units in the fourth quarter than the next three vendors’ shipment volumes combined. This, Nokia executives pointed out, was the result of its streamlined operations, which produced on average nearly 1.5 million units each day during the quarter.

Interestingly, Nokia makes the most profit and most revenue from their N-Series devices. Though they ship many more low and mid-range devices, they’ve been charging an arm and a leg for the N95 and other high end devices, and people have been paying! A lot!

This shows that people are ready for capable smartphones at the price ranges of mid-range laptops. According to the IDC report:

Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.

That’s a lot of the market with very capable handsets!