For years Nokia has been the largest maker of mobile phones on the planet. The company is still the largest supplier of both traditional and smart handsets, but the emergence of new mobile platforms, such as Google Android, are inevitably changing the market realities. According to Gartner, Samsung is now the main supplier of Android-based smartphones.

Gartner reported Samsung as the top Android smartphone provider in terms of sell through to end users in the United States for the third quarter of 2010. According to Gartner, Samsung captured 32.1% of the U.S. Android smartphone market in Q3 2010 based on retail sales, an increase from 9.2% of the Android smartphone market in Q4 2009.

Samsung Mobile attributes much of the success to its Galaxy S portfolio of premium smartphones, which recently passed the three million shipment milestone in the U.S.

The Samsung Galaxy S portfolio sports 4" Super AMOLED display screen, 1GHz Hummingbird application processor, Google Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system in the near future as well as a number of other premium software features.

According to ComScore, a market tracking company, 60.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in October, up 14% from the preceding three month period, representing 1 out of every 4 mobile subscribers. RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 35.8% share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.6% share (up 0.8% points). Google Android saw another month of strong growth, rising 6.5% points to capture 23.5% of smartphone subscribers. Microsoft accounted for 9.7% of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 3.9%. Despite losing share to Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow.

Tags: Samsung, Google, Android, Apple, Nokia, Blackberry