Ars Technica reports: Like a commercial break that strikes right when the made-for-TV movie is just getting interesting, a new study says that worldwide smartphone growth reached its lowest rate during the third quarter of 2008. Renewed competition has caused manufacturers to play market share musical chairs, though, with Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, and even Palm all experiencing surprising shifts.

According to Gartner's report, worldwide smartphone sales reached 36.5 million units in the third quarter 2008, which was an 11.5 percent increase from the same quarter in 2007. Moving forward, Gartner still sees growth for the smartphone market, albeit at a slower pace for now due to the struggling global economy. You can expect smartphones to get even cheaper, perhaps through subsidizing, but Gartner notes that data plans may still be too expensive for mainstream users.

Breaking down third quarter sales by handset vendor, we see that Nokia retained its massive lead over the rest of the market, but saw a three percent drop in its worldwide share to 42.4 percent. The vendors who took the lion's share of the remaining global sales in Q3 include BlackBerry maker RIM with an 81.7 growth rate over 2007, selling 5.8 million handsets to claim second place behind Nokia with 15.9 percent of the market. Apple claimed third place with a whopping 327.5 percent growth rate, 4.7 million units sold, and 12.9 percent of the market, while HTC comes in at fourth place with 25.9 percent growth, shipping 1.6 million handsets (up from 1.3 million last year) and taking 4.5 percent of the market.

Looking at smartphone sales by operating system, the most significant changes from last year include a double-digit decline for Nokia's OS and Apple knocking Microsoft to fourth place. Symbian, which Nokia just finished acquiring, has a larger share of the market at 49.8 percent, though it experienced an even steeper decline than Nokia's handsets. RIM's BlackBerry OS maintains second place among smartphones with 15.9 percent, but Apple's massive growth has resulted in its claiming 12.9 percent of the global market, overtaking Microsoft for third place. Windows Mobile experienced its own decline of three percent in sales to claim what is now 11.1 percent of the market.

Linux-based smartphones saw a sales decline of 9.1 percent, moving 2.6 million units to take fifth place among OSes with 7.2 percent of the market. In distant sixth place is Palm with 780,000 units, likely bolstered by sales of its low-end Centro phone that gave the company an impressive 103.3 percent growth year-over-year to 2.1 percent of the market.

The primary reason cited for Nokia's troubles and loss of market share is the lack of a competitive touchscreen phone. The N95 offered some reasonable competition to Apple's market-stirring iPhone when it was priced at $500 and $600 in June 2007. But now with the iPhone at $200 and $300, rumors of a $99 version at Walmart after the holidays, and a horde of equally priced competition from Google, HTC, and RIM, even the N97 is priced out of range at nearly $700--and it doesn't even arrive until sometime in the first half of next year.

Gartner cites the smartphone platform as one of the most significant battlegrounds going into 2009. With everyone matching each other fairly well when it comes to basic features, the question of what a phone can do after it's taken out of the box is becoming an increasingly relevant one to answer when deciding. This rising importance of cell phone platform and software is also why we gave the iPhone SDK and App Store a Platform of the Year award in the Ars 2008 Ovatio Awards. Look for mobile platforms to get even more interesting in 2009, as Android starts to realize its potential and Microsoft finally brings its own app store to the ring.

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