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Nokia is planning a major smartphone assault late this year, and will harness both its operating systems to reverse its declining share, said Anssi Vanjoki, head of mobile solutions. Vanjoki caused confusion recently when he appeared to say Nokia would focus its high end range entirely on its new MeeGo OS from next year, but has now clarified that the dual-OS strategy still stands, as the market leader fights serious pressure, even its European heartland.

The latest figures from researchers at IDC show that Nokia has been overtaken by Samsung as the largest provider of non-smart featurephones in western Europe, while its smartphone lead has been eroded from 57% a year ago to 40.8%. This remains above Nokia's magic number of 40% share, but only by a whisker. If Samsung's major smartphone push, centered on its Android Galaxy S family, pays off, it could overtake Nokia for the overall market lead in Europe - and is also the only player with the reach and scale to threaten the Finnish giant in its emerging economy strongholds.

Nokia's overall handset market share in its home territory fell from 39% to 32.8% year-on-year, shipping 14m units in Q110. Samsung's share, though, rose from 26.8% to 29.3%. The Korean vendor already snatched the US market lead from Motorola last year.

In cellphones as a whole, other gainers were Apple, whose share rose from 2.3% to 7%; LG, which now accounts for 9.6%; and RIM, up to 5.6%. Sony Ericsson was also losing ground, down from 14.9% a year ago to 8.7%.

In smartphones in particular, Apple is now in second place behind Nokia with 25%, up from 11.7% in Q109, overtaking RIM, though the BlackBerry maker did gain share too, up from 14.3% to 20%. HTC grew from under 5% to 7.5% percent and Motorola from virtually nothing to gain 1.7%. Samsung, which has still to make a smartphone impact, actually fell back in this sector, and only accounted for 2.5% in the first quarter, while Sony Ericsson had fallen out of the top rankings altogether.

All this means Samsung and Nokia are both under intense pressure to make their new smartphone pushes a success in the second half of the year, with the challenge particularly critical for the Finnish giant. A successful fightback ahead of the holiday season, sustained through 2011, is an urgent necessity.

And it will be spearheaded by MeeGo and Symbian devices, says Vanjoki, who has published several impassioned statements in the past weeks on his blog, about his strategy to regain Nokia's glory. He wrote: "Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm. This is a role I've personally been preparing for over the last 20 years. We have all the assets - including R&D and product development - at our disposal under one roof, to produce killer smartphones and market changing mobile computers."

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