In its Tuesday report pertaining to handset sales to end-users, market research firm Gartner revealed that the third quarter witnessed the emergence of Samsung as the world’s leading smartphone vendor for the first time.

The latest Gartner statistics showed that Samsung sold nearly 24 million smartphones during the third quarter, with the figures marking a three-fold increase over the number of smartphones that the company sold in the same quarter last year.

Even though global smartphone sales increased 42 percent quarter-on-quarter to 115 million units, Gartner’s chief analyst Robert Cozza said that the sales were slower as compared to the previous quarter largely because of the worldwide economic situation as well as the fact that consumers apparently waited for new models – including iPhone 4S - to hit the markets.

Cozza also revealed that Samsung’s backing of the Android operating system, along with its availability of a wide array of economically-priced Android-based handsets, had helped Google’s mobile phone software to increase its OS market share to 52.5 percent. As per the Gartner data, as many as 60.5 million Android-powered smartphones were sold during the mentioned quarter.

With the Gartner data also showing that Nokia still remains the second biggest smatphone vendor in the world, and Symbian OS the second-ranking smartphone OS in terms of popularity, Cozza said: “We don't expect to see a major impact on sales until the second half of 2012.”