Motorola experienced the largest market share increase among the top five vendors in the third quarter of 2005 and widened the gap with Samsung. Motorola did well with sales of the RAZR phone, with 12 million units sold by the end of September.

With prices falling and additional colors introduced, this phone has grown in popularity and raised Motorola's profile in the market.

Despite offering close to a dozen wideband-CDMA models, Motorola has been suffering in this area, as overall sales have not matched expectations but also as competitors such as Nokia and Samsung started to focus more on this market.

Samsung remained in the third position, with 25.7 million phones sold, and its market share totalled 12.5 percent, however it lost ground to Motorola as the company suffered from inventory build-up this quarter and continued not to address the emerging markets as aggressively as Motorola and Nokia have.

In Western Europe, sales reached nearly 40 million units mainly due to replacement sales. "Users in this region continue to be attracted by new models coming onto the market, and vendors shipped quite a few new products in the third quarter.