Samsung, Apple threatening to overtake Nokia in smartphone market

Much of the talk surrounding the global smartphone market has focused on the battle between mobile platforms – the rise of Google's Android and Apple's iOS alongside the continued decline of Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS. Now, a research firm is turning its attention to original equipment manufacturers, where Nokia, the company behind Symbian, is also poised for a drop.

According to Nomura, both Samsung and Apple are nipping at the heels of Nokia to overtake the Finnish handset maker as the most widely used devices across the globe for both consumers and enterprises.

"Nokia looks set to relinquish its smartphone crown to Samsung and Apple," Nomura analysts said in a recent report. "Further emphasizing the shift in power to Asia is our forecast for HTC to almost match Nokia during 2012."

That means a total of three fellow OEMs are currently going after Nokia.

According to experts, Nokia has ridden the wave of featurephones to dominate the OEM sector. However, the sharp rise in the popularity of smartphones and the desire for greater access and enhanced computing power among consumers and enterprise end-users have made it hard for the company to keep up.

Nomura researchers said both Samsung and Apple could overtake Nokia during the upcoming third quarter, pushing the Finnish firm to No. 3 in the market seemingly overnight.

"There is certainly a very close three-way battle going on for top spot in global smartphone volumes between Nokia, Apple and Samsung during the second quarter," Neil Mawston, analyst at Strategy Analytics, recently told Reuters.

But Nokia does have its new partnership with Microsoft to fall back on. According to Microsoft officials, Nokia smartphones running the Windows Phone mobile operating system are expected to hit the market later this year.

Some experts have predicted the deal between the two companies will benefit both. That could be especially true in the enterprise mobility sector, as more organizations may move to support WP7-based Nokia devices under their enterprise mobility platforms wireless expense management solutions because of their longstanding relationship with Microsoft in other areas of business.

According to IDC, it will take some hard work on both ends of the partnership for such a trend to come to fruition. The research firm said that, until Nokia begins releasing large volumes of WP7-based devices in 2012, both companies will continue to garner small market share in their respective segments.