Android moved to third position in the smartphone OS market worldwide in the second quarter, while HTC made its first appearance in the top ten handset vendor rankings published by industry analyst Gartner, the analyst said Thursday.

Market leader Nokia lost more than 2.5 per cent handset market share year on year for 2Q10, despite improving its shipment volumes, the firm said.

LG, Sony Ericsson and Motorola also lost points, while Samsung, RIM, and Apple all made gains. The market grew overall, but price pressure was pronounced.

Figures released by Gartner showed that the overall handset market turned in double-digit growth year on year. Global device sales to end users hit 325.6 million for the three month period, a 13.8 per cent improvement on the second quarter of 2009. Sales of smartphones, at 19 per cent of the worldwide total, improved by more than 50 per cent year on year.

The growth in sales, and in smartphones in particular, owed something to the drop in average selling price. That drop, said Gartner’s research vice president Carolina Milanesi, was caused by “a stronger dollar, a depreciating euro and intense competition that drove price adjustments and changes to the product mix.”

Nokia’s loss in market share came despite improved shipments of 111.5 million units for the quarter, up from 105.4m for the same period in 2010. While Gartner praised Nokia’s core assets of economy of scale and distribution, the analyst joined the chorus of voices warning Nokia about its problems in the high end.

There was good news for Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, which made its first appearance in Gartner’s top ten rankings, coming in at number eight. The vendor, which has capitalised on its leadership in the Android space, clocked year on year growth of more than 139 per cent in shipments to 5908.8 million. This doubled its market share to 1.8 per cent.

Source: Gartner

In the smartphone segment, where shipments for the quarter hit 61.6million, Android was the big winner, with the Google-backed OS growing its market share from 1.8 per cent in 2Q09 to 17.2% in 2Q10. This puts Android, which has a range of vendors supporting it, just one per cent behind RIM in the global league table. In the US, however, Android overtook RIM to become the most popular mobile operating system, Gartner said.

Symbian remains in front by some distance, with 41.2 per cent of the smartphone market, but this is a big drop from its 2Q09 position of 51 per cent.

Apple grew its share in the top end from 13 per cent to 14.12 per cent, while Microsoft’s Windows Mobile dropped from 9.3 per cent to five per cent.

Source: Gartner