The Real Smartphone Surprise? Samsung's Crushing

While Nokia's market share has fallen off a cliff in the last year and Apple's continued to roll with its iPhones, Samsung may be world's leading smartphone maker in the second quarter, according to a new report from the investment analysts at Nomura.

Tomi Ahonen puts the news in context, highlighting what a crazy reversal this really is, given the state of the market just a year ago.

So, lets start with how inconceivable this all is. For full year 2010 smartphone market, Nokia towered over its rivals, sold 100 million smartphones and was literally twice the size of number two (RIM 48 million) and obviously bigger than number 3 (Apple iPhone 47.5 million). Where was Sammy? Samsung was down in 5th place (HTC ahead of it for full year 2010 smartphone sales) and Samsung sold 24 million smartphones for the full year.

It's enough of a turnaround for the Japanese Korean company that your loyal tech writer cannot resist making the worst pun ever: Samunsung. (Apologies to Korean companies everywhere for accidentally gifting a flagship company to Japan.)

Via Bruce Sterling & Tomi Ahonen.