Last week we did a quick overview of the major players in the mobile market, but it turns out we missed a fairly large. ZTE is hardly be regarded as a significant player in Europe, North America, but the report IDC shows that in 2010 they have shipped more cell phones than RIM globally.

The Chinese company registered a higher increase in the number of phones were sold last year than any of the major brands and was comfortably the fourth largest manufacturer worldwide. According to IDC, ZTE sold 51.8 million mobile phones in 2010 (as compared to only 26.7 million in 2009), which is 3 million more than what RIM has succeeded.

In the UK alone, ZTE some good 4 million phones in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Send Blackberry down to fifth place globally, while Apple leaves the big 5 fully (for now, at least). Sony Ericsson, Motorola and HTC shift to 6th, 6th and 8th place.

Some other interesting figures from IDC report includes the 18.5% growth as mobile phone handset market globally for the year 2010. LG was the only company that had their shipments fall on year, even in autumn was a meager 1 percent.

However, we believe that the South Koreans will make up some lost ground with exciting devices like Optimus 2 X and Optimus Black just around the corner.

Meanwhile, Canalys published a study on their own, which reveals that the Android OS was the number 1 selling over the last three months. It scored an impressive 615% growth to 33.3 million units shipped and lost Symbian for leadership.

Canalys also showed that WP7 phones do better than some previous rumors suggested-3.1 million of them have already been shipped.

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