Quarterly smartphone shipments topped 100 million for the first time in Q4 according to new figures from IDC. The firm said that vendors shipped a total of 100.9 million smartphones during Q4 2010, up 87.2 percent from the 53.9 million shipped in Q4 2009. For the full year, vendors shipped 302.6 million smartphones worldwide, up 74.4 percent from 173.5 million in 2009. IDC’s figures are more bullish than other recently published smartphone data. For example, Strategy Analytics last month pegged Q4 smartphone shipments at 94 million (up 75 percent) and at 293 million units (up 67 percent) for the full year. IDC cited Google’s Android platform as the main driver of growth. “Android continues to gain by leaps and bounds, helping to drive the smartphone market,” said IDC’s Ramon Llamas. “It has become the cornerstone of multiple vendors’ smartphone strategies, and has quickly become a challenger to market leader Symbian.”

All vendors named in the study reported rising unit shipments, though there were some significant shifts in market share, notably Nokia’s drop from 38.6 percent in Q4 2009 to 28 percent in Q4 2010. Apple’s market share remained flat at 16.1 percent but this was sufficient to see it overtake RIM as the second-largest smartphone vendor due to the BlackBerry-maker’s share slipping from 19.9 percent to 14.5 percent. The quarter also saw the launch of two new smartphone platforms: Nokia’s Symbian^3 and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. “By the end of the quarter, Nokia had shipped 5 million Symbian^3 units while Windows Phone 7 vendors shipped more than 1.5 million units,” noted Llamas. “Now, with the holiday quarter over, both platforms will need to sustain this initial growth in the quarters to come.”