Outside of the vast Apple universe, an Asian tech firm known as Samsung Electronics continue to make significant headways, reporting on Friday that it made more than $US5 billion in operating profit for the first three months of 2012.

The South Korean tech giant, presently regarded as Apple's closest rival, has disclosed that its overall earnings from January through March shot up by more than 80 percent, with the boost anchored on its smartphone and tablet product lines.

Unlike Apple, Samsung manufactures both high-end and entry level hand devices, making the firm the number one smartphone manufacturer at the end of 2011, slightly edging out the American firm in the race.

This week, Apple reported more than 35 million units of iPhone as officially sold but analysts believe that Samsung may have managed to outsell its fiercest rival by a wide margin.

According to Reuters, Samsung cell phones attracted 90 million of total sales in the March quarter, 44 million of which were counted as smartphone, giving the firm an edge of more than four million from the iPhone sales laid out by Apple recently.

The numbers, Samsung said, also bested the quarterly sales of Nokia, once the leader of the pack, which analysts said pushed out from the shelves some 88 million handsets by the end of March, 12 million of which were labelled as smartphones.

Yet Samsung did not stop in the mobile handset competition as again unlike Apple, the company manufactures flat television sets and supplies the product's important components to its competitors.

The result: Samsung has recently become the ruling tech company in terms of revenues sales, blazing past the names that occupied global households not too many years ago.

Presently, Samsung is at the top of its game, leaving Sony, the once dominant Japanese electronics consumer maker, and Nokia wondering what went wrong and what Samsung has been doing right so far.

Soon enough and if Samsung sustains its pace, Apple could reserve enough company resources just to figure out how to keep the Asian firm at a safe distance as the consistently rising tech titan in the East continue to gun for the top.

"We cautiously expect our earnings momentum to continue going forward, as competitiveness in our major businesses is enhanced," Samsung investor relations chief Robert Yi said in a statement and as reported by The Associated Press (AP).

And according to research firm IDC, gadget manufacturers should find quite a big room to tussle it out in the smartphone market the world over, which is expecting to receive shipments of up to 660 million this year.

The Chinese market also offers tremendous opportunities for both Apple and Samsung, with the latter enjoying a bit of a foothold in the exploding market on the strength of its existing agreements with China's three leading telcos.

On the other hand, Apple is still in the process of understanding the market dynamics of the world's second biggest economic powerhouse as stated earlier by Apple chief executive Tim Cook.

Mr Cook has admitted that companies with great understanding of how the Chinese market operates will reap solid benefits in form of solid cash flow.

Analysts are in agreement that the smartphone market will fuel the prospective growth of many tech players this year, with Chinese consumers contributing much of the push.

Yet to date, only two firms have successfully lured the attention and money of China's increasingly affluent citizens - Apple and Samsung, with Nokia almost silently fading out as the two forcefully flexed their muscles.

Apple has issued the iPhone 4S and the new iPad in the past two quarters while Samsung is set to unveil on May the third edition of its hit Samsung Galaxy S smartphone - seemingly the only unit out there that came close to prod Apple into serious thinking.

"The smartphone market has almost only two players, Samsung and Apple," Lee Sei-Cheol of Meritz Securities has observed in a Friday interview with BBC.

The third wheel, Nokia, is betting its fate on uncharted territories, hoping that its Windows 8-powered smartphones set for released last quarter of 2012 will provide the necessary traction for the company to finally map its road to recovery.