Apple's share of the smartphone market jumped to 14.4% in 2009, overtaking Microsoft's Windows Mobile to become the No. 3 smartphone operating system, according to Gartner.

Overall sales of smartphones to end users reached 53.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2009, up 41.1% from the same period in 2008. For the full year, smartphone sales totaled 172.4 million units in 2009, up 23.8% from the previous year.

Smartphone-focused vendors like Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) successfully captured market share from other larger device producers in 2009: iPhone's 6.2 percentage point increase was the highest gain recorded among smartphone platforms surveyed, while RIM's share grew by 3.3 percentage points, tightening RIM's hold on second place at 19.9%.

 
Other shifts in the worldwide smartphone market:

• Google's Android expanded its market share by 3.4 percentage points, from 0.5% in 2008 to 3.9% in 2009.
• Symbian, used primarily by Nokia, maintained its market leadership in the OS space, but lost some of its dominance during the year, falling from 52.4% in 2008 to 46.9% in 2009.
• Microsoft's Windows Mobile slipped 3.1 percentage points to 8.7% in 2009.
• Palm's WebOS, launched just last year, accounted for 0.7% of the worldwide market.

The mobile handset market closed out the year essentially flat: Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users totaled 1.21 billion units in 2009, down 0.9% from 2008.