Windows Phone has no more than three or four percent - depending on who you ask - of the global smartphone market, but in some parts of the world, it's doing much better than that. And over in the UK, it seems that at least part of that success is coming at the expense of another rival smartphone platform.

According to Canalys, around 570,000 Windows Phones were sold in the UK in the first quarter of this year - that's a 32% increase compared with the same quarter a year ago. That's not bad at all, considering the UK smartphone market as a whole declined by 1.5% over the same period. Windows Phone's latest growth puts its UK market share at 7.6%, up from 5.8% in Q1 2014.

It seems that Microsoft has benefited in part from the misfortunes of BlackBerry, which has seen its own global market share collapse in recent years. Tim Coulling, Canalys senior analyst, told The Register: "Microsoft is attacking B2B users with decent-quality, low-cost handsets, and people are refreshing BlackBerry with Microsoft."

He added that the company "is slowly building share without a flagship or high-spec handset - they are after the volume end of the [professional] market. This strategy will probably change when Windows 10 comes out."

Unsurprisingly, Apple and Samsung topped UK smartphone sales last quarter, but Samsung's sales fell by 8.5% to 2.54 million devices, or 33.6% of the market. However, Microsoft managed to beat other major manufacturers including Sony, whose sales fell year-on-year from 500,000 to 470,000; and Motorola, which dropped 10% to 420,000.

Source: The Register