A report from Gartner puts Android as holding 50% of the smartphone market – that’s despite Cupertino managed to ship a not-too-shabby 25m units itself. Worldwide smartphone sales were 472m last year. Android’s share was up from 30% 12 months previously. The crucial fourth quarter of last year saw href=”http://www.apple.com/” rel=”homepage” target=”_blank” title=”Apple”>Apple become the world’s third largest mobile phone maker, with7.4in of vendor, giving it 7.4% of market share – a place it snatched away from href=”http://www.lg.com/” rel=”homepage” target=”_blank” title=”LG Corp.”>LG. Fellow South Koreans and href=”http://www.samsung.com/” rel=”homepage” target=”_blank” title=”Samsung”>Samsung (!) managed to shift 34 million units (mainly thanks to its runaway success, the Galaxy S2 which is still selling by the bucketload). And that is, of course, just one manufacturer running the Google Android operating system