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It's been a tough year for handset makers, but Samsung is poised to beat its own 2009 unit sales forecast, largely on the back of full touchscreen models like its first Android device, the Galaxy, or its high end Jet superphone.

Samsung says it should sell more than the 200m cellphones it had targeted for 2009, and touchscreen models will account for one in five of those it sells. It did not provide a revised forecast for the full year sales figure, but we can get a clue from its statement that it has already sold 50m touchscreen devices as of mid-November. This compared with 10m sold by the end of November in 2008.

Samsung's scale means it has been in the forefront of the move to push touchscreens, and other features more commonly associated with smartphones, into the midmarket. "The growth in sales shows the rapid adoption of touchscreen phones by mainstream consumers," the company said in a statement.

The type of handset in which Samsung excels is the media-savvy midrange phone, such as its Star S5230, its bestselling phone ever, having shipped over 10m units shipped since it launched at the end of May. Most of the Korean giant's touchscreen handsets have been sold in Europe (19m), followed by north America on 6.3m, China on 3.4m and its Korean home market on 3m. In smartphones as a whole, 45% sported touchscreens at the end of the third quarter, up from 31% a year earlier, according to researchers at Canalys.

Touchscreens have become more popular on smartphones. The proportion of smartphones with touchscreens reached 45 percent in the third quarter of this year, up from 31 percent a year ago, according to market researcher Canalys. Nokia, Research In Motion (RIM), Apple and High Tech Computer (HTC), in descending order of market share, together hold 80 percent of the smartphone market, Canalys says.

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