Apple's iPhone accounts for 7.9% of all mobile phones sold worldwide

Yesterday Research firm Gartner released its latest mobile device data for the first quarter of 2012. The research company found that Apple’s 33.1 million iPhones sold accounted for roughly 7.9 percent of the total mobile phone market. This is not quite in congruence with the numbers from Apple who stated last month that they sold 35.1 million iPhones.

What’s interesting is that Apple’s share doubled from the first quarter of 2011, when the company sold 16.8 million iPhones and represented 3.9 percent of all mobile device sales.

For the first time since 1998 Nokia have been dethroned by Samsung. The new leader sold 86.6 million units and took 20.7 percent of the market, while Nokia was in second with 83.2 million units, or 19.8 percent share.

The whole data can be seen below:

Research in Motion, keeps declining and saw its market share drop from 3 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to just 2.4 percent in the same period in 2012, with sales of 9.9 million handsets.

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit found in the data released by Gartner was that total worldwide mobile phone sales saw a 2 percent decline from the first quarter of 2011. According to Gartner this is the first time since the second quarter of 2009 that the market saw a decline.