South Korean tech giant Samsung continued to outdo Apple in smartphone sales in the third quarter of the fiscal year while Nokia fell to the seventh place.

According to a latest report by research firm Gartner, Samsung managed to clasp its lead over Apple in the smartphone market due to the strong demand for the Galaxy smartphones.

In the third quarter, Samsung totaled a sales figure of 55 million smartphones and commanded a 32.5 percent smartphone share market. .Meanwhile, Apple accounted 23.6 million units of smartphone sales, touching a 14 percent share of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2012.

However, both Samsung and Apple continue to dominate the global smartphone market with a total sale of 46.9 percent to 169.2 million units in the third quarter of 2012 as the demand for internet-linked devices scaled up in comparison with the feature phones.

"Both vendors together controlled 46.5 percent of smartphone market leaving a handful of vendors fighting over a distant third spot," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The report also showed that the sales figure of smartphones has continued to escalate in the market even though the sales of overall mobile phones declined 3 percent.

"After two consecutive quarter of decline in mobile phone sales, demand has improved in both mature and emerging markets as sales increased sequentially," added Gupta.

"In China, sales of mobile phones grew driven by sales of smartphones, while demand of feature phones remained weak."

Meanwhile, Finnish mobile maker Nokia saw a bad quarter in terms of the smartphone market with the total sale of 7.2 million units. Nokia slipped off to the seventh place from third place in the global smartphone sales despite its Lumia 900 witnessed a sale of four million units globally.

"Nokia had a particularly bad quarter with smartphone sales", Gartner recorded. "The arrival of the new Lumia devices on Windows 8 should help to halt the decline in share in the fourth quarter of 2012, although it won't be until 2013 to see a significant improvement in Nokia's position."

Even though Nokia's smartphone market dropped, the company still bolstered the mobile phone sales with 19.2% market share.