Nokia has long been top of the heap for worldwide marketshare when it comes to phones, but it sees that the company could be losing ground in the smartphone market to some of the other big names out there.

Serious changes in the last 12 months...

Indeed, research firm Gartner has release a breakdown of mobile marketshare over the course of 2009 and some of the results should prove particularly interesting for anyone with an interest in the phone market. In 2009, Nokia boasted 36.4% of the mobile market (in terms of sales), a very respectable figure indeed. Of course, the fact that the Finnish company boasted 38.6% in 2008 means that they’ll likely not be pleased with it.

Indeed, it seems as though Nokia is quite safe for now, but given the fact that Samsung has managed to make the jump from 16.3% to 19.5% marketshare in the last year, it seems as though Nokia could well have something to worry about. LG has made a similar leap, moving from 8.4% to 10.1%. Still, this is all just for normal phones, in terms of smartphones the situation is a little more worrying for Nokia.

While Nokia dropped around 3% in the mobile market, the smartphone market saw it take a relative plunge, falling from 52.4% marketshare to 46.9% in 2009. In the same period, RIM, the company behind the often ubiquitous seeming Blackberry jumped from 16.6% to 19.9%. Apple seems also to have made some fairly serious gains over the course of the last year, brining the iPhone from 8.2% up to 14.4%.

If nothing else, the research makes for some very interesting reading indeed. We’ll be curious to see how well Nokia fares over the course of the coming year, given that it had already been fairly clear that the company wasn’t doing too well in 2009 for quite some time. Still, these numbers highlight what’s happened in the mobile market over the last year, as well as just which companies have picked up the slack after Nokia’s losses.