Growing consumer demand on top of business sales has helped both Apple and RIM eat into Nokia's share of the mobile phone sector.
Strong sales of iPhone 3G handsets and BlackBerry models in the third quarter saw Nokia's share of the market for smartphones fall to 38.9 per cent in the quarter from 51.4 per cent a year before, according to market research firm Canalys.
However, Apple's market share jumped to 17.3 per cent and RIM's to 15.2 per cent in the quarter.
"The introduction of the iPhone 3G in July and Apple's expansion into many more countries helped propel the vendor to second place globally," Canalys said in a statement.
The researcher said it was "quite feasible" to expect RIM to take the second place from Apple in the holiday sales fuelled fourth quarter, helped by new products including the Bold, the touch screen Storm and clamshell Pearl 8220.
While growth in the wider mobile phone market slowed to just three per cent in the third quarter, the smartphone market grew 28 per cent from a year ago to 40 million phones.
Nokia has led the smartphone market for several years, but its sales fell from a year ago for the first time in the third quarter as it focused on manufacturing new top-end models in volume.
The drop worries investors and analysts as this is expected to weigh on the Finnish group's profit margins.
The success of Apple and RIM pushed Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform to the fourth spot in the smartphone operating system market with a 13.6 per cent share.
Symbian, the largest software vendor, saw its market share fall to 46.6 per cent from 68.1 per cent a year ago as its main user Nokia and smaller Japanese vendors lost ground.
