This according to research outfit Strategy Analytics, which predicts LTE phone shipments will spike to 67 million this year.

Now, a nearly tenfold increase over the course of a year might seem like a stretch, but with big carriers in the U.S., Japan and South Korea aggressively expanding their LTE networks, and handset manufacturers beginning to pump out devices to take advantage of them — HTC, Samsung and, soon, Apple — Strategy Analytics believes there will be a huge upswell in adoption.

Said Neil Mawston, the firm’s executive director, “[2012 will be a ] breakout year for 4G LTE technology.”

Research outfit Strategy Analytics recently surveyed smartphone owners in the U.S. and Britain and found that the vast majority of them preferred handsets with large screens. Offered a choice between their current smartphone and one with a bigger display, almost 90 percent of the consumers Strategy Analytics surveyed opted for the latter.

How much larger? The research outfit didn’t break out the percentage difference in announcing its findings, though it did say that consumers prefer smartphones with screens in the 4-inch to 4.5-inch range, provided they are also relatively light and thin.

Not the most surprising of findings, but certainly interesting. The display on Apple’s iPhone has been 3.5 inches since the device first debuted and, obviously, it continues to be wildly popular among consumers (though Apple is rumored to be building a 4-inch screen into the next iteration of the iPhone).

So the market has clearly embraced that screen size. But perhaps it is ready for something a bit larger — as long as you don’t look like you’re talking into a piece of toast when you use it.

Of the 2.7 million Windows Phone devices sold during the fourth quarter of 2011, Nokia accounted for 900,000, according to research from Strategy Analytics. That’s a little more than 33 percent — more than enough to claim the top spot in the market.

That said, there really isn’t much of a market yet. Sales of 2.7 million Windows Phones is a paucity compared to the 37 million iPhones Apple sold during the fourth quarter.

But it’s a start, and evidence that Nokia’s expanded portfolio of Windows Phone 7 handsets, and the marketing push behind them, is working.

“Nokia is by no means out of the woods yet, and it is still on a long road to recovery,” said Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics. “But capturing the top spot in the Microsoft smartphone ecosystem is an encouraging baby step forward for the company.”

The device continued to trounce all comers in the second quarter, with a full 80 percent of the North American tablet market, according to Strategy Analytics. Out of the 7.5 million tablets sold in the U.S. and Canada, six million were iPads. The remaining scraps were divvied up between Motorola, Research In Motion, Samsung and other would-be rivals.

A commanding lead, and clearly tough to follow, let alone match.

That said, Strategy Analytics believes Apple’s grip on the American tablet market will be “hard, but not impossible” to break. And if anyone is going to do that, it will be Amazon, which is expected to uncrate its new Kindle tablet today — less than three months before the holiday shopping season (my colleague Peter Kafka will be covering the event live).

“Provided the pricing, screen size and hardware design are right, Amazon can be one of the main challengers to Apple’s dominance,” says Strategy Analytics director Neil Mawston. “Like Apple, Amazon has a strong brand, compelling content, sophisticated billing systems and widespread distribution.”

Sure does, as I’ve written here before:

… Amazon’s got its work cut out for it. But it has also got a better set of tools than most to work with. The company’s tablet will almost certainly be built to tap in to media services like Kindle, Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Cloud Player. It will likely be built to support its Cloud Drive storage offering, as well. If Amazon gets the UI and form factor right — and early reports suggest it may have — this could be a compelling piece of hardware and a true iPad rival. Remember, Amazon, like Apple, has not only a big storehouse of mobile content, but a massive base of registered, credit-card-holding, trusting users to sell it to.

And those are tremendous advantages, particularly in a market that has seen so many comers without them struggle or fail, sometimes miserably.

[Image credit: Appertunity]

Meanwhile, in a separate report, IDC noted that Apple’s share of the overall handset market more than doubled in the second quarter, rising to 5.6 percent from 2.6 percent a year earlier. That makes it the world’s fourth-largest manufacturer of all mobile phones after Nokia, Samsung and LG. “[Apple] easily posted the highest growth rate of the worldwide leaders despite the fact that its flagship iPhone 4 is now more than a year old,” IDC noted. “[The company's] ability to bring its smartphone momentum to developing economies, where it’s less successful, will help dictate the company’s smartphone fortunes in future.”

And those fortunes look quite promising, given Apple’s achievements to date. After all, the company has managed to become the fourth-largest handset vendor in the world and its largest seller of smartphones in just four years, with essentially one phone.

The company’s chip-manufacturing business remained its biggest contributor to profit, though its earnings were well below the near-record level of a year ago. Its flat-panel business lost money for a second consecutive quarter.

Samsung’s cellphone earnings were lifted by higher sales of smartphones. But for the first time since it started reporting quarterly performance a decade ago, Samsung declined to say how many cellphones it shipped. Strategy Analytics, a Boston-based market research firm, later estimated Samsung shipped 74 million units, up 16 percent from a year ago.

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Astonishingly, it took just four years.

According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, Apple’s wholesale revenues from the iPhone hit $11.9 billion for the quarter, exceeding those of Nokia, whose aggregated total revenues from smartphones, feature phones and basic phones combined was $9.4 billion.

Nokia shipped 108.5 million handsets in the first quarter of 2011, while Apple shipped 18.6 million iPhones. How did it manage to surpass the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer in handset revenues?

Foremost, by focusing on the high-margin, premium segment of the handset market. Strategy Analytics estimates Apple’s global wholesale average selling price for the iPhone was about $638 in Q1 2011–some seven times greater than the ASP for Nokia’s various handsets, which it figures was $87. But there were other contributing factors as well: the iPhone’s iconic brand, its usability, the strength and appeal of the iOS platform on which it runs and the services portfolio it offers through iTunes and the App Store.

Those factors will continue to serve Apple well in the years ahead, though whether they’ll be enough to sustain its lead in the face of a fast-growing installed base of Android smartphones and Nokia’s new partnership with Microsoft remains to be seen.

With tablets running the Google mobile OS beginning to proliferate now, those days of Apple’s easy dominace of the market are winding down. Shipments of Android devices in the quarter, for example, leapt to 2.1 million units from about 100,000. “Apple’s volumes will continue to go up, but market share will inevitably go down,” Strategy Analytics’ director Neil Mawston told Bloomberg . “Even at $500 retail, based on some of the research we’ve done, that’s probably two or three times more than what most mass market consumers are expecting to pay….If you were to ask me in two years time will Apple have less than 50 percent of the global tablet market, I think that’s a certainty.”

Perhaps. Depends on how the competition shakes out, I suppose. And just how high Apple raises the bar for its rivals with the iPad 2.

UPDATE: It also depends on the manner in which the competition reports sales numbers. To wit, it turns out that those 2 million Galaxy Tabs Samsung sold were actually sold into the channel and not necessarily to consumers, suggesting that this spike in Android growth may not be quite what it seems.

“We have narrowed [the issue] down to the way we assemble the engines,” Nokia Executive Vice President Niklas Savander explained, adding that the number of devices affected is small in comparison to the total number shipped. “However, for the one individual where it’s not working, it is, of course, a significant issue. As a precautionary measure we have taken immediate action across the product line.”

A tough break for Nokia and the N8, its long-awaited marquee smartphone and the first to run the Symbian 3 OS. Said Strategy Analytics Neil Mawston, “This doesn’t help the Nokia brand, that’s for sure. The problems have been mounting for the past few years and every little negative headline adds to that. It’s not a great start for their supposed iPhone or Android killer.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Nokia N8 Ships
• Nokia’s N8: Table Stakes in the High Rollers Room

[Image credit: Flickr/Christchurch City Libraries]

The cause of the delay isn’t clear, though its result most certainly is. When LePad finally arrives at market, it will be competing with a group of rivals that extends well beyond Apple’s iPad–Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, Reasearch in Motion’s PlayBook and the like. As Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston said in a research note earlier this month, “The tablet wars are up and running. Apple has quickly leveraged its famous brand, an extensive retail presence and user-friendly design to develop the tablet market into a multi-billion-dollar business. Android, Microsoft, MeeGo, WebOS, BlackBerry and other platforms are trailing in Apple’s wake, and they already have much ground to make up.”

’Course Mawston also said, “Apple’s huge lead will be shortlived.” We’ll see, I guess.

Apple (AAPL) now has an almost 14 percent share of the smartphone market and an almost three percent share of the overall handset market. The company shipped 8.4 million iPhones during the quarter–a nice increase from the 5.2 million it shipped a year earlier, but down from the 8.8 million of the prior quarter. And to Strategy Analytics, that suggests the iPhone juggernaut may be slowing, if only a bit. “The honeymoon period for Apple in the mobile world is clearly coming to an end,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston wrote. “Apple was criticized for its intensive production methods in China, while the iPhone has been heavily criticized for its poorly designed touchable antenna, and may have lost some heartshare in recent weeks because of its perceived mishandling of the antenna problem.”

Because of that, said Mawston, the iPhone is now “more vulnerable to competitive attacks from rivals like Nokia, Android, BlackBerry and Motorola.” More vulnerable, sure. But only to the well-armed attacker, and I’m not sure you could say that about everyone on Mawston’s list. Not yet, anyway.

And seriously, Nokia?

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, December 2006

“Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, January 2007

At 37.9 percent, Nokia’s share of the global handset market is the largest in the industry. Odd then to learn that it is not the most profitable. And odder still to learn that that honor belongs to Apple, which has been in the handset market for just two years.

According to Strategy Analytics, Apple’s third-quarter iPhone operating profit was $1.6 billion, while Nokia’s was $1.1 billion. Driving Apple’s profits: Strong sales, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls.

“We have identified at least 4 key factors underlying Apple’s success,” Strategy Analytics analyst Alexander Spektor explains. “First, Apple created a simple sub-brand–the iPhone–which was memorable and easy to remember. Second, the firm developed an attractive family of models with standout usability that enabled Apple to charge way-above-average prices to operators and consumers. Third, Apple distributed and co-marketed its handsets through top-tier carriers in numerous high-value countries. And fourth, the vendor has kept a solid grip on production costs by working with Foxconn, the world’s largest contract handset manufacturer.”

Quite an achievement for Apple (AAPL) and a major humiliation for Nokia (NOK), which has seen its dominance eroded by the likes of Apple and Research in Motion (RIMM), and not just in North America, but in Europe. Indeed, in its latest quarter Nokia’s smart-phone market share dropped by six points.

As Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston noted at the time, “[Nokia has] no iPhone killer to drive a major revival in its smartphone volumes. [It] is still struggling in the U.S. smartphone market, and with competition intensifying in China as well, Nokia’s battles can only get tougher in 2010.”

Analysts mulling over Nokia’s IP infringment suit against Apple seem to be of two minds about how the action will play out. There are those, like Neil Mawston at Strategy Analytics and Ben Wood at CCS Insight, who warn that Apple (AAPL) is on dangerous ground here at best. It’s almost impossible to build a cellphone without using Nokia’s (NOK) intellectual property, they claim. And if that’s the case with the iPhone, then Apple could end up paying Nokia hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees if Cupertino ends up on the losing side of this suit. (Click on text image below to see list of patents at issue.)

Some analysts, like Maynard Um of UBS, see Nokia’s action as a preemptory move against a possible infringement suit from Apple aimed at Nokia’s own multitouch handsets.

“We believe Nokia’s suit could be a pre-emptive move ahead of its new handsets launching soon that may have multi-touch capabilities for which Apple has IP,” Um wrote in a note to clients this morning. “We would not be surprised if Apple eventually files an infringement suit if Nokia’s handsets are deemed to infringe its IP and we believe Nokia would prefer any court action to be combined as prior cases have been. We expect the legal process to be drawn out & could involve US Patent Office reviews.”

The endgame here? Most likely an out-of-court settlement and cross-licensing agreements–assuming Apple’s willing. After all, Nokia is on record admitting its fondness for Apple’s technology.

Asked once about the striking similarities between a touchscreen device it was designing and Apple’s iconic handset, Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s head of multimedia devices replied, “If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.”

Check out the video:

Dragging the company down: A 908 million euro goodwill write-off in the Nokia Siemens Networks venture it co-owns with Siemens (SI). Revenue was 9.8 billion euros, or about $14.6 billion, which was down about 20 percent compared to last year. Worse, smart-phone market share declined to 35 percent from 41 percent in the previous quarter.

Six points gone in three months? That’s a brutal loss and one that demonstrates just how much pressure the company is seeing from Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM), among others.

“Nokia is launching plenty of new high-end smartphone models, such as the N900 and N97 mini,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston told Reuters. “But as yet there is no iPhone killer to drive a major revival in its smartphone volumes. Nokia is still struggling in the U.S. smartphone market, and with competition intensifying in China as well, Nokia’s battles can only get tougher in 2010.”

Still, Nokia (NOK) did have some good news to report. It expects mobile device volumes to increase in the fourth quarter of 2009 and it sees the global handset market shrinking less this year than analysts had feared–seven percent instead of 10 percent.

“It is encouraging to see some signs of recovery in our markets,” Kallasvuo said during a conference call. “But let’s be clear, uncertainty in end-consumer demand remains.”

Dragging the company down: A 908 million euro goodwill write-off in the Nokia Siemens Networks venture it co-owns with Siemens (SI). Revenue was 9.8 billion euros, or about $14.6 billion, which was down about 20 percent compared to last year. Worse, smart-phone market share declined to 35 percent from 41 percent in the previous quarter.

Six points gone in three months? That’s a brutal loss and one that demonstrates just how much pressure the company is seeing from Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM), among others.

“Nokia is launching plenty of new high-end smartphone models, such as the N900 and N97 mini,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston told Reuters. “But as yet there is no iPhone killer to drive a major revival in its smartphone volumes. Nokia is still struggling in the U.S. smartphone market, and with competition intensifying in China as well, Nokia’s battles can only get tougher in 2010.”

Still, Nokia (NOK) did have some good news to report. It expects mobile device volumes to increase in the fourth quarter of 2009 and it sees the global handset market shrinking less this year than analysts had feared–seven percent instead of 10 percent.

“It is encouraging to see some signs of recovery in our markets,” Kallasvuo said during a conference call. “But let’s be clear, uncertainty in end-consumer demand remains.”

That’s the conclusion of a new study by Strategy Analytics, which found that consumers are not so taken with mobile connectivity that they’ve completely lost site of household budgetary constraints. Especially if they’ve got broadband at home; just 10 percent of the 1,100 households surveyed would be willing to cut wired broadband service to save money.

Said Strategy Analytics VP David Mercer, “These results suggest that, while American consumers consider home broadband service to be a vital utility, they see mobile data service as simply a ‘nice to have.’”

That might be the case now, but I wonder for how long. Wireline broadband is far more mature than mobile broadband, so it makes sense that it’s viewed more as necessity than luxury. But as devices like the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and Palm (PALM) Pre become more ubiquitous, it seems inevitable that “nice to have: will become “must have.”

[Image credit: Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships]

“Android has fast been winning healthy support among operators, vendors and developers,” said Strategy Analytics director Neil Mawston. “A relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open-source structure and Google’s support for cloud services have encouraged companies such as HTC, Motorola, Samsung, T Mobile, Vodafone and others to support the Android operating system. Android is now in a good position to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years.”

If that comes it pass, it’s bad news for Palm (PALM) whose Pre handset and WebOS will be facing off against a powerful mobile triumvirate: Apple (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM) and Google (GOOG).

• Nokia (NOK) shipped 118 million handsets, up five percent. The company lost market share in all regions, with smartphones “a major weak spot.”
• Samsung shipped 52 million handsets, up 22 percent. Its market share reached an all-time high at 17 percent, up from three percent in 1998. The company was strong in North America and Western Europe, weaker in emerging markets.
• Sony Ericsson (SNE, ERIC) shipped 25.7 million handsets, down one percent. With a five percent sequential increase, the company passed LG and Motorola (MOT) to become the the third largest company in the industry by units.

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Nokia (NOK) continued to dominate the market, with a 41.1-percent share, up from 40.9 percent in the first quarter, shipping 122 million phones. Samsung followed with a 15.4-percent share, with Motorola (MOT) holding onto the third spot at 9.5 percent, followed by LG at 9.3 percent and Sony Ericsson at 8.2 percent. The research firm noted that Apple (AAPL) had just 0.2 percent of the global market in the quarter, as it prepared for the launch of the iPhone 3G.

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According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple will sell 6.3 million iPhones in the U.S. in 2008, or about 35 percent of the touch-screen phone market. (Now, before you go get all up in my face about how the number is too low, remember that this is a U.S.-only number.)

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