Nokia today announced that it had sold just over 100 million cellphones this spring, extending its dominance of the global cellphone business. The results were a 29 percent jump over the same period last year and gave the Finnish company a record 37 percent of the 273 million cellphones sold worldwide. Much of the growth was on the back of strong smartphone sales, the company said: over 9 million N-series and 2 million E-series were sold, with specific devices such as the 5-megapixel N95 cameraphone faring especially well. Most of this was in areas such as Europe, Nokia added.

The results put Nokia well ahead of rival Samsung, according to IDC results. The Korean firm grew by over 48 percent but still netted just 13.7 percent of the world market, overtaking the struggling American handset maker Motorola who dropped by 31 percent to hold third place at 13 percent. Sony-Ericsson and LG reached fourth and fifth place at 9.1 and 7 percent respectively.

The demographics set the context for Apple's introduction of the iPhone during the same timeframe. Its sales reached 270,000 units during the initial launch, or just a tenth of one percent of the total cellphone market during the same period. Apple chief Steve Jobs also projected that the company will sell about 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, or about 1 percent of the market as it was in 2006.

But these small figures may hide the actual effect of the Apple device on the market, according to IDC mobile director Shiv Bakhshi, as many rivals may react to the launch and carriers may be forced to shift control of deals away from themselves and towards hardware producers.

"The iPhone is likely to have a disproportionately large impact on the industry," Bakhshi said. "It could forever alter the structural relationship between device vendors and mobile operators who have traditionally controlled the mobile environment, especially in the US. Equally important, the unparalleled hype surrounding the iPhone could lift mobile devices out of a utilitarian frame of reference and place them squarely in the fashion frame of reference, potentially raising [average selling prices] for the entire industry. For the present, however, it seems at least to have raised the profile for all converged mobile devices."