The Australian mobile phones market continue its climb and latest figures from IDC Australia showed that almost 13 million units were snatched by local consumers in 2010 alone, coming from the 10.99 million handsets sold in the previous year.

The numbers, experts said, showed that more than one million mobile phones were sold each month in the country last year, which they said pointed to the growing Australian market that will soon see the dominance of smartphones as feature phones are gradually relegated to the backseat.

While Android-powered phones are expected to flood the market in the months ahead, IDC said that Nokia will be far from giving up its leadership in the handset war despite the imminent retirement of its Symbian platform.

In lieu of the ageing mobile OS, Nokia is set to deploy smartphones that will come installed with the recently released Microsoft mobile platform Windows Phone 7, as reflected by the partnership forged by the Finnish company with the tech giant, leading to new Nokia smartphones aimed by both companies to be released by the first quarter of 2012.

The Nokia-Microsoft team up should further boost the phone maker's dominant position in the handset market as it scrambled to raise its feature phones divisions sales by implementing hefty cuts on its tag price and attempted to catch up on the smartphone segment by collaborating with the American company.

Experts said that Windows-powered phones are expected to see double-digit growth within the next four years as signalled by the 57 percent spike in smartphones sold in the past year.

Despite the expected decline of the feature phones segment, IDC said that Nokia "actually increased their market share in feature phones fairly substantially in the fourth quarter, and a big reason for that was the sharp price drops across their feature phones," which reached an attractive discount of up to 43 percent.

Its continued success, however, in the feature phone segment did not stop Nokia from preparing the company to play in the market that would soon be engulfed by smartphones as IDC's Mark Novosel stressed that "Nokia is playing in the low- and mid-range markets until they come out with the first-generation of Windows devices."

IDC has predicted that in the next few months, the mobile phones market will see Google Android and Apple lording over their nearest rivals, while Microsoft's late arrival will eventually catch up and by 2015, its market share will jump more than 20 percent.

On the other hand, Novosel said that Research in Motion's BlackBerry will continue to be eclipsed by its competitors despite the entry of new products that he said paled in comparison to top-of-the-line Android handsets, most specifically against the mobile platform's smooth browsing features.