Smartphone sales for the second quarter of 2011 have been released by ABI Research.

The overall trend in Q2 was an increase of 62% from last year and a 2.2% increase from the last quarter. So the smartphone market still seems to be growing, but there are signs that it's slowing down.

The most significant thing in this months report is that Apple has now become the top smartphone manufacturer. Apple's smartphone sales in the 2nd quarter were 20.3 million which is a 142% increase on last year.

However, Samsung are hot on their tails with sales of 19 million, which has been boosted by the impressive 5 million Samsung Galaxy S2's that have been sold. This gives Samsung an amazing 500% increase on last year, which shows just how fast they are growing.

The sad story is for Nokia who only sold 16.7 million devices, which has also been reflected in drops in their market share which fell to 38% last year, 24% last quarter and just 16% in Q2. Nokia are banking on Windows Phone 7 boosting their sales back up, but if the gamble fails the company could be in big trouble.

Aside from the rise of Android which shipped with 47 million smartphones in Q2 (46.4% market share) , the rise in demand for premium smartphones in China has also heart Nokia.

The results were also bad for RIM , although they did see growth in international markets but a decline in America meaning an overall drop from last quarter of 11% (13.2 million smartphones). HTC saw another growth in sales bringing them up to 11.5 million which is a growth of 113% on last year.

It'll be interesting to see the results after the launch of the iPhone 5 and how Samsung will be able to cope with the spike in demand. We're also interested to see how Nokia fair once its Windows smartphones are made available.