China has replaced the US for the first time to become the world's largest smartphone market. It is the first time that China has pushed ahead of the US in terms of the number of smartphone shipments.

More than 23.9 million devices were delivered to operators in the country during the third quarter, compared to 23.3 million in the US. According to beancounters at Strategy Analytics China smartphone shipments increased by a sizable 58 percent over the previous quarter, whereas in the US they fell by 7 percent.

Strategy Analytics director Tom Kang said there are some oddities in the Chinese market. Nokia, which is becoming forgotten in the Western markets, currently enjoys the biggest share of the country’s smartphone market, with 29 percent of all sales in the third quarter, though both Samsung and Apple are threatening the Finnish company’s dominance.

Strategy Analytics said that China is now at the forefront of the worldwide mobile computing boom and has become a large and growing smartphone market that no hardware vendor, component maker or content developer can afford to ignore.