80 million smartphones shipped in Q3 2010

We now have the final numbers for the total smartphone shipments, as reported by The Big Four in analyst houses: Gartner, IDC, Canalys and Strategy Analytics. As always, we took the average of their reported quarterly total numbers and are calling the third quarter total smartphone sales at 80 million even. Last quarter was at 61.7 million, but if you compare 3Q 2010 to the same quarter last year, you get shocking growth: 41.06 million to today's 80 million is almost 100% Year-on-Year growth!

So the year is only heating up with smartphone sales! I am now projecting the year to end in the 290M to 300M range, which is well above what all analysts [including us] thought at the start of this year. It means also, that we are very close to whether smartphones outsell all types of personal computers including tablet PCs, this year. I was expecting that to happen next year.