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One of the trends in Nokia’s fourth quarter results was its increase in smartphone market share.

Nokia released double the amount of touchscreen devices in this last quarter than the previous period, resulting in its estimated smartphone market share rising from 35% (in Q3) to 40%.

The top performers were the touchscreens N97 mini, 5800 and 5530.

Our own converged mobile device volumes, comprising our smartphones and mobile computers, were 20.8 million units in the fourth quarter 2009, compared with 15.1 million units in the fourth quarter 2008 and 16.4 million units in the third quarter 2009.

We shipped approximately 4.6 million Nokia Nseries and approximately 6.1 million Nokia Eseries devices during the fourth quarter 2009, up from the combined 8.9 million Nseries and Eseries devices we shipped in the third quarter 2009.

On its blog, Nokia ponders whether or not a touchscreen is necessary to make a smartphone popular…

If you believe that to be true, what do you think it is that makes a touchscreen interface so indispensable when it comes to multi-talented top-end devices? Granted, one of the more obvious answers might be that a touchscreen boasts the ability to play the role of chameleon, adapting its control layout to suit the task at hand – such as how kinetic scrolling suits browsing lists on the N97 mini or double-tapping a web page makes a lot of sense as a zoom-in gesture – but there must be more to it than purely its talent to adapt to suit the task at hand.

What else does a touchscreen offer that makes it so appealing – could it be as much about design and aesthetics as functionality, because surely a clean slab of glass is more attractive than a key-filled fascia? Now that may or may not be the case, but what we’re most interested to find out is what you think.

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