According to the latest metrics from Gartner — which measure sales of handsets to customers, not shipments into the channel — Samsung sold 86.6 million mobile phones in the first quarter, 25.9 percent more than it sold during the same period a year ago. That was enough to give it a 20.7 percent share of the market, and to seize the title of “world’s largest mobile handset vendor” from Nokia, which sold 83.2 million cellphones during the quarter, as its market share slipped to 19.8 percent from 25.1 percent a year ago.

Unfortunate news for Nokia, which had been the market’s leader since 1998, but inevitable given the company’s recent decline and, perhaps, its choice of Windows Phone as an OS for its newest handsets.

Because what’s driving Samsung’s growth is Android. According to Gartner’s sales data, Samsung was by far the largest Android smartphone vendor, claiming nearly 44 percent of Android-based smartphone sales. Interestingly, no other Android phone manufacturer captured more than 10 percent of the market.

So, if Samsung commandeered the handset market’s top spot in the first quarter, and Nokia its second, who claimed third? Apple, which sold enough iPhones to capture 7.9 percent of the total mobile phone market.

As for mobile OS market share, Android continues to rule the market — 56 percent of smartphones sold to end users globally in the first quarter of 2012 run the OS, far more than the 22.9 percent running Apple’s iOS.

Makinen, a hardware test specialist, has been abusing cellphones for years. It’s all part of Nokia’s effort to make sure that the devices can handle the same abuse once they are in the hands of customers.

“The purpose is to break things,” says Teemu Ala-Hynnila, director of quality operations at Nokia. That way, they can spot weaknesses and correct them before the products are released. Plus, he said, they don’t want customers to have to protect the phones with ugly rubber cases.

One room over, more prototypes are enduring other hardships. One chamber cooks phones to 55 degrees Celsius, while another sees how they do at -15 degrees Celsius. A third produces somewhere between 93 percent and 95 percent humidity.

In each case, a Nokia worker is able to pull the phone out, press a button and take a picture without delay.

The torture area is just one part of Nokia’s testing labs in Tampere, Finland. AllThingsD got a rare peek inside an area normally off-limits not only to visitors, but to most Nokia employees.

The labs themselves are a mix of old and new technology. One room resembles a 1970s sound studio. In there, enough sound is pumped in to simulate the noisiest of New York restaurants, while a robot talks into a cellphone. The robot is barely audible in the room unless you get right next to it. On the call, though, the sound is clear.

A few rooms over, a human-shaped plastic mold is filled with liquid, an effort to recreate the human form in order to test how much of a phone’s radiation is making it inside the body of a person using the phone.

Nokia is certified to do its own radiation emissions, a key step in getting new devices approved by the Federal Communications Commission and other regulators across the globe. Having its own labs, while costly, helps Nokia save the time needed to send new devices for outside testing, a move it hopes will help it crank out new devices faster.

Citing the fact that more than 3,000 people died last year in distraction-related crashes, the NTSB is calling on all 50 states to ban the use of personal electronics while driving. And, contrary to early reports, it is proposing there be no exception for handsfree devices.

“No call, no text, no update, is worth a human life,” Board chairman Deborah Hersman said in a statement on Tuesday. “It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving.”

While many states have created their own laws outlawing talking and texting while driving, most allow the use of handsfree devices, such as bluetooth headsets or speakerphones.

The NTSB is proposing that devices that aid in driving, presumably navigation systems, be allowed, as well as emergency use of devices.

Although the NTSB is calling on the states to pass such laws, the U.S. government has been known to threaten the withholding of federal highway funds in order to get its way on issues such as speed limits or mandatory seat belt laws.

The carriers and cellular trade industry group CTIA have supported distracted driving campaigns as well as various legistlation, while Apple, Microsoft, Google and others have increasingly been building hands-free capabilities for both dialing and texting into their devices.

The CTIA offered praise for the notion of curbing distracted driving, though it only offered specific support for the notion of banning texting by hand.

“CTIA and the wireless industry agree that when drivers are behind the wheel, safety should be their number one priority,” CTIA CEO Steve Largent said in a statement. “Manual texting while driving is clearly incompatible with safety, which is why we have historically supported a ban on texting while driving. As far as talking on wireless devices while driving, we defer to state and local lawmakers and their constituents as to what they believe are the most appropriate laws where they live.”

There are also an increasing number of apps, some offered by carriers, that allow parents and drivers to shut off most cellular functions when a device is being used in a moving vehicle. In some cases, the device can automatically text a reply noting that the recipient is driving.

(Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com | lisafx)

He flatly refused to tip his hand at last week’s AsiaD conference. But on Thursday, Sony announced that it is indeed buying out Ericsson in the two companies’ Sony Ericsson joint venture.

Under the terms of the deal, Sony will pay Ericsson 1.05 billion euros; will enter a broad patent cross-licensing deal, giving all of Sony’s products license to Ericsson’s patents; and will take ownership of five patent families directly related to wireless handsets.

Although Hirai refused last week to say whether Sony would buy out the joint venture, he did say it was essential for the company to have control and influence over the unit’s products. And what better way to get control and influence than by taking full ownership?

In their statement announcing the deal, the two companies noted that a lot has changed since the venture was set up 10 years ago, and that, given the shift to smartphones, there is less overlap than there once was with the rest of Ericsson’s business.

Sony also said the move will help it offer more integrated products.

“We can more rapidly and more widely offer consumers smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions that seamlessly connect with one another and open up new worlds of online entertainment,” Sony CEO Howard Stringer said in a statement.

Regardless of who owns it, the handset business has its work cut out for it, having dropped in status to a relatively minor player in the global smartphone business, despite having some nice Android-based hardware.

The company, which sells prepaid phones and service under the Cricket brand, said on Wednesday night that it will soon start selling a variety of phones across the country via Best Buy and other retailers. Among the products it will sell are phones with the company’s unique Muve Music service.

Enabling the expansion is a deal that Leap has with Sprint, allowing it to sell Cricket even in cities where it doesn’t have its own services available.

“This is a significant milestone in the plans we announced last year to create a new, hybrid wholesale and facilities-based model that is unique in the wireless industry,” Leap CEO Doug Hutcheson said in a statement. “We are excited to bring Cricket’s innovative wireless products to a large group of consumers who until now have not been able to take advantage of the tremendous value these products provide.”

Best Buy will start selling devices beginning Sept. 25, with other retailers following over the next two months including select Wal-mart stores, Dollar General stores as well as HSN.

In conjunction with the expansion, Cricket is adding some new phones to its lineup, including the Score, an Android phone from China’s ZTE and, later this year, a Muve-compatible feature phone called the Chorus.

Prison inmates have been using their Facebook accounts, often via contraband cellphones, to threaten their victims and harass others, says the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

In one instance, a child molester who had been in prison for seven years sketched pictures of his then-17-year-old victim based on her current Myspace and Facebook pages and sent them to her family.

Other inmates are simply updating their status messages while incarcerated — as in the pictured Facebook profile above, where an inmate talks about running and playing handball in the prison yard. In order to post updates, it appears he was using a cellphone, which inmates are not allowed to have, but often do. The CDCR said 7,284 cellphones were confiscated in the first half of 2011, compared to 261 in all of 2006.

CDCR’s solution is to engage Facebook’s security team to remove any accounts set up or monitored on behalf of inmates while they’re incarcerated. It put out a press release this week saying Facebook had agreed to do so and encouraging citizens to report state inmates’ Facebook accounts.

That wouldn’t necessarily stop inmates from illicitly viewing Facebook, as in the case above, but it might stop them from actively participating.

Facebook told the Sacramento Bee it makes a practice of cooperating with law enforcement requests, though the CDCR said that prior to this pact it has only been able to get Facebook to take down a single account.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The group, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, has looked at more than 900 agents and classified more than 400 as carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, or possibly carcinogenic to humans. The IARC has added cellphones to that last group.

“The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans, based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer,” the WHO said in a statement. “This has relevance for public health, particularly for users of mobile phones, as the number of users is large and growing, particularly among young adults and children.”

The organization said because there appears to be some risk, the issue needs further study.

“Given the potential consequences for public health of this classification and findings,” said IARC Director Christopher Wild, “it is important that additional research be conducted into the long-term, heavy use of mobile phones. Pending the availability of such information, it is important to take pragmatic measures to reduce exposure such as hands-free devices or texting.”

Naturally, the cellphone industry trade group took issue with the finding.

“Today, an International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working group in Lyon, France categorized radiofrequency fields from cellphones as ‘possibly’ carcinogenic based on ‘limited evidence,’” said John Walls, vice president of public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association. “IARC conducts numerous reviews and in the past has given the same score to, for example, pickled vegetables and coffee.”

Concern over health issues related to cellphones and the radiation they emit have lingered since the advent of such devices, with different regulations in different geographies requiring cellphone makers to measure and disclose the amount of radiation coming from their products.

Walls noted that the study didn’t definitively conclude that cellphones do cause cancer, and said that other organizations have examined the same data and come to different conclusions.

“Based on previous assessments of the scientific evidence, the Federal Communications Commission has concluded that ‘[t]here’s no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer,’” Walls said. “The Food and Drug Administration has also stated that ‘[t]he weight of scientific evidence has not linked cellphones with any health problems.’”

According to various blog reports, one talks to the Elfoid–as the phone is known–and then the speaker’s voice comes out of the fetus-like device. Worse yet, it has a texture reminiscent of human skin and tickles the recipient when a call comes in. Apparently Osaka University and NTT DoCoMo are the ones responsible for making me feel like I need to shower again.

The video below doesn’t do more than show the Elfoid from various angles and reaffirm the product’s aforementioned creepiness, but I couldn’t help watching it.

In any case, there is a cottage industry developing for products that help those who want to stop texting and yammering on their phones, but need some help.

In the latest such move, T-Mobile plans to start offering a program for Android phones called DriveSmart Plus that allows subscribers who opt-in to have their phones automatically tell when the user is driving and put the phone into a driving mode that disables most texting and calling features. Calls can be set to go straight to voicemail, and a text message can be sent to people who are calling or texting to let them know that the recipient is driving.

Of course, all of this requires users to opt-in, so it will only help those who recognize that they have a problem and actually want to do something about it. And there are ways to override it, which is useful if there is an emergency or the cellphone user is a passenger in a moving car.

But, hey, it is a start. T-Mobile will offer DriveSmart Plus initially only for one phone–the LG Optimus T–but said it plans to expand the service soon. DriveSmart Basic, a free version of the app, is available for free on some T-Mobile phones, although that app requires users to tell the app when they are driving. DriveSmart Plus, the new premium program, will cost $4.99 per month and covers all lines on a subscriber’s account.

DriveSmart Plus is from a venture-backed start-up called Location Labs. T-Mobile is also launching another Location Labs-developed service, dubbed FamilyWhere, for tracking children or family members via their cellphones. It’s apparently useful for monitoring an elderly family member or keeping tabs on school-age kids (or perhaps tracking that cheating spouse, if they are foolish enough to opt-in to the service).

Mobile messaging is also big, though in most parts of the world young women are far more likely than young men to send text and picture messages. There were some exceptions, such as India, where men were twice as likely as women to send texts and four times more likely to send pictures.

The Nielsen research was conducted in 19 countries, though the report broke out results only for the U.S., UK, India, Italy, Brazil, China, Spain, Russia and Germany. In most countries Nielsen surveyed 5,000 young people, though in the U.S. it surveyed 75,000 youths. In some countries the research was done face-to-face and in others the survey was done online.

In most countries across the globe, young men are more likely than women to have smartphones, though the U.S. is an exception with young women making up 55 percent of smartphone owners between 15 and 24. The adoption of smartphones versus feature phones also varies widely. In India, for example, feature phones outnumber smartphones 9 to 1 among young people, while in Italy smartphone adoption is nearing 50 percent among the younger set.

Advanced data usage was highest in the U.S and China, where about 17 in 20 young people did more than just make calls and send text and picture messages. That type of data use was least common in India, where only 13 percent did so, However, another 51 percent of Indian youths used their phones for text and/or picture messages.

The Nielsen study also looked at other patterns including use of more than one SIM card and whether phones are prepaid or postpaid, although those trends seemed to have more to do with how the country’s cell phone industry is set up as opposed to indicative of trends among youth.

Communication gadgets and other consumer electronics burn up 15 percent of all the electricity consumed in households around the world, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. If the use of electronics continues to spread at the current pace, their energy draw could double by 2022 and triple by 2030. At that point, they would absorb as much electricity as all houses in the U.S. and Japan today.

But are electric gadgets vampires or saviors? Telecommuters who would otherwise burn gasoline to get to work, or drivers who get to their destination quicker by using a GPS device are actually saving energy, argues the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

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But according to Scott Birnbaum, vice president of Samsung’s LCD unit, its sales are benefiting from “vidification,” a term he uses to describe consumers trying to create a big-screen experience at home.

“When you went to the movie theater, you had this incredible picture and sound,” he says, and makers of televisions, PCs and even cellphones are all looking for ways to offer a similar viewing environment.

For PCs, manufacturers are quickly adopting a 16:9 aspect ratio, the length-to-height ratio that has been a standard for HD television screens, Mr. Birnbaum says. That means that laptops are becoming less boxy and more like wide-format TV screens, a trend that computer makers have capitalized on to goose sales. When one of these laptops is side-by-side with an older model, he says, “people are gravitating to the new format very quickly.”

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Quite a trend developing here and one certain to quicken, thanks to the deepening recession. “There’s clearly a reason to give up a landline phone if budgets are tight,” CDC scientist Stephen Blumberg told The Associated Press. “Given the current economic environment, I’d not be surprised to see more and more people give up their landline phones for economic reasons.”

$480 buys a lot of Ramen….

(Image credit: Justin Hancock)

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Walt Mossberg and BoomTown are in San Diego for DEMOfall, which is one of two big tech start-up demo conferences taking place this week (the other is TechCrunch50 in San Francisco).

At both conferences, a passel of start-ups come to show off their wares to an audience of media, venture capitalists and one other.

The big focus at DEMOfall this year has been on social networking, mobile technology and cloud computing–three of the big Web 2.0 trends–although I liked the company that can make a stolen cellphone sound like a really annoying car alarm.

Walt and I also appeared here this afternoon onstage in what was called “Head-to-Head,” a feature we hope to debut on this site soon.

Essentially, the idea is to discuss and debate the top tech issues of the moment, although it was not meant to be a wrestling match between Walt and me (perish the thought!).

Thus, we interviewed each other–much as we do tech leaders on the stage of our D: All Things Digital conference.

Yesterday’s topics included the Google new Chrome browser, the growing power of the search giant, business prospects for social networking and the future of cellphones.

(I also did a decent impression of Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, but that’s another story.)

It will all eventually be available on DEMOfall’s Web site soon, but here’s my video about the conference so far:

“We’re seeing some evidence there’s a lengthening of replacement cycles,” Jacobs said.

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For the quarter, the company posted net sales of $13.151 billion Euros, up 4 percent both year-over-year and sequentially, and ahead of the Street consensus of 12.8 billion Euros. Earnings per share, excluding special items, were in line at 36 Euro cents.

The company sold 122 million phones in the quarter, up 21 percent year-over-year and 6 percent sequentially. Smartphone units totaled 15.3 million; the company estimates the industry shipped 37.1 million smartphones in Q2. Average selling prices fell to 74 Euros from 90 a year ago and 79 in the first quarter. Nokia said 30 percent of the year over year decline and 40 percent of the sequential decline reflected exchange-rate related factors.

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