IDC Nokia owned the global smartphone space in 2009

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According to IDC’s survey of the global smartphone market in 2009, released Thursday, worldwide smartphone shipments grew 39 percent annually in the fourth quarter of 2009, totalling 54.5 million units. Smartphone makers shipped a total of 174.2 million phone units throughout 2009, a 15.1 percent increase over the 151.4 million units shipped in 2008.

Smartphones accounted for 15.4 percent of all mobile phones shipped in 2009, up slightly from 12.7 percent in 2008, IDC said. IDC’s senior research analyst Ramon Llamas of the research firm’s mobile devices technology and trends team noted that smartphone shipments reached a “record level” in 2009.

IDC’s senior research analyst Kevin Restivo noted that 2009 marked the expansion of Android and webOS devices, predicting that new Symbian and Windows Mobile devices to fuel the smartphones growth in 2010:

More advances are in store for 2010 as Symbian and Windows are expected to unveil new versions of their respective operating systems. These and other operating systems will compete with attention-grabbing intuitiveness and seamlessness, a thriving mobile application library, and a compelling user experience that tightly holds on to the user. In the end, users will benefit from not only greater usability, but greater personalization and customization as well.

Nokia’s smartphone lead is shrinking, but the firm still filed as the #1 vendor with the 38.9 percent unit share in 2009, down from 40 percent in 2009, based on 67.7 million shipped units. RIM and Apple took the #2 and #3 slots, respectively. BlackBerry took 19.8 percent of the global smartphone market in all of 2009 and 19.6 percent in the fourth quarter, while Apple grabbed 14.4 percent and 16 percent in all of 2009 and in the fourth quarter, respectively.

The research firm estimated that Apple shipped 25.1 million iPhone units in all of 2009, nearly doubling the 13.8 million iPhones shipped a year ago. Motorola returned to the top five list, thanks to the DROID and CLIQ/DEXT launches that helped push the fourth quarter unit sales to 2.9 million units, earning the company 4.6 percent market share in the quarter, up from 4.1 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Note that IDC’s figures exclude OEM sales for all vendors and that vendor shipments are branded shipments.