Research analytics firm Gartner has released its Q4 report, which shows that Apple took a 24 percent share of the global smartphone market -- the largest share of any single smartphone maker. This was aided by pent-up demand following the extended 15-month period where the iPhone 4 was on sale resulting in Apple achieving a a 121.4 percent of year-over-year increase in iPhone sales over the October to December period. While Apple reported that it shipped 37 million iPhones during the last quarter, Gartner estimates that 35.5 million of these ended up in users hands
