Trevor has sent in a link to iPhone Market Share: The Rest of the Story which attempts to look deep into the recent smartphone market share results and in my view offers some clarity while also managing to agree that the data can be looked at in many ways. Who knows what the real answer is?

“How did the most recent quarter of Apple (AAPL) iPhone sales compare to the competition? It depends. A statistician would say, “How do you want it to look?”

Philip Elmer-DeWitt recently wrote an article called “The iPhone grabs/loses market share”. In it, he discusses two other articles by different authors, using similar data, and coming up with opposite conclusions about the health of iPhone sales in the global smart phone market.

In one article, James Rogers for TheStreet.com reported that Q4 2009 iPhone sales comprised 16.4% of the global smart phone market, up from 10.8% in Q4 2008, a 52% increase while the smart phone market increased 28% over the same period.

In the other article, Niraj Sheth for the WSJ Blogs looked at sequential quarters and saw iPhone market share decrease from 18.1% to 16.6% from Q3 to Q4 2009, a 8.3% decrease while the global smart phone sales increased 30% over the same period.

Both of the above articles were based on opinions from professional analysts and are technically correct, but they provide a narrow view of the situation and individually or together, do not provide enough information to draw helpful conclusions. More analysis is needed to resolve the above discrepancy…”