Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, will lose its position as the

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biggest seller of smartphones this quarter for the first time as handsets running Google’s Android become cheaper, Gartner said.

Nokia sold 20.9 per cent of the smartphones purchased by consumers in the second quarter as phone companies and retailers sold off overstock of its older Symbian phones at lower prices, Roberta Cozza, a Gartner analyst, said over phone. The Finland-based phonemaker, which has held the top spot in Gartner’s smartphone surveys since their start in 2006, is shifting to a new line based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone software to compete with Android and Apple’s iPhone.

“If we see a Nokia turnaround on Windows Phone, it will be in the second half of next year,” Cozza, based in England, said. “We’ll see the first Windows Phone in the fourth quarter but I’m not expecting much of a change this year.”

Apple, with an 18.2 per cent share, and Samsung, with 15.8 per cent, are nipping at Nokia’s heels in the market for smartphones, which permit users to run word processors, movie viewers and video games. They’ve already passed Nokia in shipments to carriers and retailers, Strategy Analytics said last month. Consumers are increasingly shifting to lower-priced Android handsets, Gartner said.

Android handsets have been selling for less than $141 and prices might be less than $106 by the end of the year, Cozza said.

Android was the best-selling smartphone platform as sales rose more then fourfold to 43.3 per cent of the market, led by Samsung and HTC. Carriers including Vodafone advertised Android phones with prices as low as $ 128 from vendors such as Huawei and ZTE of China.

Nokia also maintained the lead in overall handset shipments as Samsung fell behind in some emerging markets, Gartner said.

Gartner repeated an earlier forecast that handset sales growth could slow to as little as 12 per cent to 1.78 billion units for the full year. Second-quarter sales rose 17 per cent. Smartphones are expected to lead with 50 per cent to 55 per cent full-year growth compared with 74 per cent growth in the second quarter.

“In western Europe, there is uncertainty among consumers and this is not taking us to an upgrade cycle as fast as we expected,” Cozza said. “We’re seeing smartphone growth slowing down mainly in some key European markets like Italy and Spain where economic uncertainties are mounting.”

About 30 per cent of the 428.7 million phones sold in the quarter were from so-called white box vendors, small manufacturers mainly in Asia that don’t have well-known brands, Gartner said.