Sony Ericsson have slipped to fifth place in the handset sales market (reports SMSTextNews) with LG replacing them. The report, from Gartner, puts LG on around 8% of the market for sales during Q1 of 2008. Nokia are still number one, with 115.2 million phone sales, and there's also a global increase on all handset sales from Q1 2007 of 13.6%.

Samsung continue a strong number two position, up from last years Q1 32 million unit sales to 42 million, while Motorola, not surprisingly, dropped from 47 million to 29 million units.

"While sales in emerging markets continued to be driven by strong net new subscribers’ growth, mature markets felt the pressure of an uncertain economic environment," said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, pointing towards a market with much less churn than has been seen previously.

More at Gartner Research.