Nokia's share of the mobile phone market dropped to 25 per cent in the first quarter of 2011, the lowest for 14 years, down from 30.6 per cent at the same time last year, technology research group Gartner said on Thursday.

Nokia had released its own figures on April 21 putting first-quarter market share at 29 per cent, down from 33 per cent in the first quarter of 2010.

Earlier this year, the company announced a radical restructuring to overcome increasingly fierce competition in the smartphone market.

The Finnish company, which had a global market share of 40 per cent as late as 2008, nonetheless remains the mobile industry leader.

It still ranking well ahead of second-place Samsung , which holds 16 per cent, followed by LG in third with 5.6 per cent, Apple in fourth with 3.9 per cent and RIM with 3.0 per cent.

Nokia announced in February that it expected a "period of uncertainty" as it phased out its Symbian platform in favour of a tie-in with Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system for its smartphones.

But Gartner said the Finnish company was still taking a beating in the rapidly growing smartphone sector, pointing out that "Android and Apple's iOS continued to dominate the smartphone operating system wars."

"Smartphones accounted for 23.6 per cent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85 per cent year-on-year," Roberta Cozza, Gartner's principal research analyst, said in the report.

Worldwide mobile phone devices sales meanwhile increased by 19 per cent year-on-year, according to Gartner's data, totalling 427.8 million units sold in the first quarter.

The research group said it expected the total number of mobile phone sold worldwide this year to tick in at nearly 1.8 billion units.