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Despite the usual dip in sales in Quarter 1 following the holiday shopping season, worldwide mobile phone sales grew 29% over the same time last year to 152.7 million devices according to research firm IDC. Smartphones, or "converged mobile devices", grew 85.8% since last year. Nokia sales dropped considerably due to a weak mid-range lineup, but the company still maintained the #1 position worldwide by a wide margin. It was followed by Motorola, Samsung, and Siemens, and Sony Ericsson just barely edged past LG Electronics for the #5 spot with 5.8% marketshare. Nokia dominated smartphone sales by an even wider margin, 41.7% compared to #2 RIM with 12.7%. Motorola, Fujitsu, and Sony Ericsson rounded out the top 5 far behind the market leader.
IDC expects the 1.5 billion subscriber mobile phone market to reach saturation and become all-replacement sometime in 2008. 2.5G phones will dominate until 2007 when 3G handsets reach 100 million units per year. IDC also expects Symbian to dominate converged devices for most of the decade, at the expense of Microsoft and PalmSource.
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