The Gartner research group says Nokia Oyj, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, lost market share, while Google's Android platform overtook the iPhone as demand for smartphones surged, reports "Bloomberg" (http://macosg.me/2/ow).

Nokia’s share of global handset sales to end users fell to 34.2% from 36.8% in the year-earlier period, according to Gartner. Smartphone sales gained 50.5%, more than three times the growth for the market as a whole. Android became the third-biggest smartphone platform with 17.2% of the market, after Nokia’s Symbian and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. Symbian lost almost 10 percentage points of market share to 41.2 percent as Nokia struggled to revamp it and ship new handsets.

Apple’s iOS fell behind Android to fourth place among smartphone platforms with a 14.2 percent market share as the iPhone 4 ramped up production, says Gartner. Android surpassed BlackBerry in the U.S. to become the country’s most-popular smartphone system, according to the report.