While there was a slowdown in AT&T's iPhone sales over the summer as anticipation grew for the expected release of a new model in the fall, Nokia reported a small increase in smartphone sales.

AT&T said yesterday that it sold 4.8 million smartphones in the third quarter, down from 5.6 million in the second quarter. Also yesterday, Nokia reported that it sold 16.8 million smart devices in the third quarter, down 38 percent from the year-ago quarter but up 1 percent from the second quarter.

?Nokia has been in a long transition to the next generation of Windows-based handsets which will debut next week,? said Ross Rubin, executive director, industry analysis at The NPD Group, Port Washington, NY.

?For AT&T, a lot of its smartphone growth has been driven by the iPhone and iPhone exclusivity. Now, not only has it lost that exclusivity and is competing with Verizon and soon Sprint, but in general, as Apple noted, they saw a bit of a fall off for iPhone sales in anticipation of a new model.?

Third place
Nokia, which has been streamlining operations this year to make itself more competitive in the mobile space, is also in the process of phasing out the Symbian platform and transitioning to Windows Phone, which is impacting its performance.

?The vendor?s Symbian smartphone unit volumes were almost flat sequentially and down annually,? said Neil Shah, wireless device strategies analyst at Strategy Analytics, Newton, MA. ?As a result, the vendor is estimated to be the third ranked smartphone vendor in terms of volumes this quarter compared to its leading position in the same quarter last year.

?Impressively, total 90 million lower-end non-smartphone handsets were shipped this quarter, which depicts that there exists a bigger world beyond expensive smartphones,? he said.

Finland-based Nokia said it shipped 89.8 million mobile phones, up 8 percent from the year-ago quarter and 25 percent from the previous quarter.

At the same time, Nokia?s sales were down on year-over-year basis, with smart device net sales down 39 percent and mobile phone net sales down 14 percent. Compared with the second quarter, smart device sales were down 7 percent and mobile phone net sales were up 14 percent.

Nokia will begin shipping smartphones powered by Microsoft Windows Phone 7 in the current quarter which is expected to give sales a boost.

?Nokia's smartphone segment has shown signs of encouragement, with 16.8 million smart devices shipped during the quarter, up from the 16.7 million sold in Q2,? said Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, Westborough, MA.

?[The new phones] should significantly improve Nokia smartphone sales in Q4 2011,? Informa?s Mr. Saadi said.

iPhone sales down
Results were mixed for AT&T, which attributed a decline in smartphone sales in part to consumers who were waiting for the new iPhone to launch in October while also reporting gains elsewhere.

?We did see a sequential decline in smartphone, including iPhone, sales in the third quarter,? said McCall Butler, spokesman for AT&T, Dallas, TX. ?But we also increased smartphone sales by about 1 million year over year.

?The sequential decline reflects, in part, anticipation for the new iPhone, which was launched earlier this month,? she said.

During the quarter, AT&T activated 2.7 million iPhones.

AT&T also announced that it activated 1 million iPhone 4S devices through Tuesday.

?This is more than one-third of our total iPhone activations for 3Q in just five days,? Ms. Butler said.

Android continues to take on a bigger role for AT&T, with sales of Android devices more than doubling year over year. Almost half of AT&T?s smartphone sales were non-iPhone devices in the third quarter.

AT&T also said that mobile broadband growth continues to be robust.

?We particularly continue to see strong growth in mobile broadband as people do more with their devices and adopt new categories of devices, like connected devices, tablets and other data-only devices emerge? Ms. Butler said. ?Mobile data revenues grew 18 percent year-over-year in the quarter and now represents an annualized revenue stream of more than $22 billion.

?We also continue to add customers on smartphones,? she said.

?Nearly two-thirds of our sales to postpaid customers were on smartphones, and this was despite the lack of an iPhone launch in the quarter.?

Wireless data revenues ? driven by Internet access, access to applications, messaging and related services ? increased by $857 million, or 18 percent, from the year-earlier quarter for a total of $5.6 billion.

Total text messages carried on the AT&T network increased by 22 percent to 196.3 billion, and multimedia messages increased by 54 percent to 4.3 billion.

AT&T posted a net gain in total wireless subscribers of 2.1 million in the third quarter, to reach 100.7 million in service. The company added 319,000 postpaid customers, 293,000 prepaid customers and 1 million connected device customers.

Branded computing subscribers for data-only devices grew by 505,000 for a total of 4.5 million. Of the total, 290,000 were tablet subscribers.

?More than half of our postpaid subscribers now have a smartphone, and we have continued room for growth,? Ms. Butler said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York