This should have happened way earlier considered that Nokia likes to put S60 in a dumb phone and calls it a smartphone, e.g. this no-3g, no-gps smartphone in 2010

Good job Apple. But more than just getting to the top, they have changed the whole market. Every phone is an iPhone now.

Volume AND profit... but, but, but... Android is more popular!

You have to give credit to Samsung though for such a growth. This quarter It might get past Apple when people are waiting for iPhone 5.

So are you the one who defines what a smart phone is? That's right, you don't. Have you ever thought that model phone might have been for a market that didn't need either of those?

I remember when Steve Jobs was on stage and getting excited about the prospect of getting just 1% of the market share of cell phones. I'd love to see the grin on his face when he saw this news.

Whether it is for a market that doesn't need a certain feature is neither here nor there -- that just makes it "smartER" than other devices commonly used in those markets.

Of course, there is no standard definition of "smartphone" that everyone agrees to, but 3G and GPS seem to be mentioned in most of the first dozen hits on the internet for "definition of smartphone".

Location awareness is pretty basic now -- it is necessary for an awful lot of apps and online services to do what they do. And a camera is much more useful with location awareness to tag photos. How smart can a phone be, if it doesn't know where I am, or if it doesn't have the bandwidth of at least the iPhone 3G of 2+ years ago that everyone complained of until it got it way back then?

Coming up with a sensible feature set is all part of making a modern smartphone that is successful. People trash Apple for leaving off things like full keyboards with wobbly plastic keys, or SD slots (although the iPhone already includes unprecedented 16GB min - 64GB!)...

...Yet, the things that truly make the phone "smart"? You say, "Hey, don't knock Nokia for calling their phone 'smart'; if they think it's 'smart', who are you to knock them?" On the contrary, jFanning, why knock ALUOp -- should you or Nokia be defining smartphones any more than he?

This is like trying to define post-PC "Tablet PC's" vs "Media Tablets". People like to say iPads are merely media tablets. Yet, what are they "hired" to do (to use Horace Dediu's phrase)? ...Much smarter things than "Tablet PCs", for sure. If you hire a phone to do a smart job, such as making use of many of the usual apps and services, then bandwidth and location awareness is pretty basic and pretty much assumed -- more so than with a tablet, because a phone is at a higher level of mobility and will be taken with you everywhere you go.

Frankly, Samsung's numbers are more impressive than Apple's...they went from 5% to 17.5% in one year...not too shabby.

What was the sell thru? I say baloney.

Samsung's numbers are impressive, but there are a couple of points here:

1. Apple has just one phone on the market (or 2, if you count the 3GS and the 4 seperately). I wonder how many smartphone models Samsung has and how many were introduced over the course of the year when it's share went up to 17.5%.

2. Apple has not yet launched a new phone, so we are talking of sales of a single model phone over a year. It has sold so well even a year after its release. And if you want to include the 3GS sales, we are talking about a phone that is over 2 years old that is still selling well.

So while Samsung's growth is great, I think Apple's numbers are more impressive.