Appletell

While the world awaits for the big Apple event on Monday, research firm Gartner has just released a report showing statistics on smartphone sales for the first quarter of 2008. And guess what? The report says that Apple is now the no. 3 vendor of smarthphones worldwide and no. 2 in the U.S.

Snagging 5.3 percent share of the worldwide smartphone market with around 1.7 million units of the iPhone sold, Apple trailed behind market leader Nokia who got 45.20% and Research in Motion with 13.45%. Nokia and RIM managed to sell around 14.5 and 4.3 million of units of their smarthphones respectively. Interestingly, despite having only one smarthphone unit available in the market, Apple still managed to post good sales performance, as compared to the other two who both have several smarthphones in their line-up.

In the US mobile phone market, Apple’s iPhone managed to get on the number two spot, next to RIM. Nokia wasn’t able to post the same worldwide data since Nokia phones are not as popular in the US. Apple got 20% share of the US mobile market while RIM got 42% of the overall market sales for smarthphones.

With the coming release of the new generation iPhone, we would expect this Apple figures to double if not triple as soon as the new iPhone hits the US market.

Via [Apple Insider]

Back to our regular stream of iPhone posts for a minute, but if you’ve been wondering how the iPhone sizes up to the competition, we’ve put together a comparison using Sizeasy.  Enjoy.