iPhone Is Once Again World's Top Selling Smartphone

iPhone is once again the world's stop selling smartphone, ousting Samsung for the first time in three years.

In the fourth quarter of 2014, around 74.8 million iPhones were sold which is 20.4% of the global smartphone market, according to new research from Gartner.

The lead was enough to push Apple ahead of Samsung which had 19.9% of the market in the quarter.

 Overall smartphone sales went over 1 billion for the first time ever, thanks to the blockbuster sales of the iPhones. Last year, more than 1.2 billion smartphones were sold, which is 28 percent from 2013.

Apple rolled out the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to other countries faster than it had in previous years which helped boost sales. The deal with China's biggest mobile provider further helped in boosting the sales of iPhone. The bigger screen size of the phone was also well received.

However, for the full year, Samsung still outsold Apple. It sold more than 307 million phones in 2014 compared to 191 million iPhones from Apple.

Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi are also doing better, the report noted.

"Chinese vendors, such as Huawei and Xiaomi, are continuing to improve their sales in China and other overseas markets, increasing their share in the mid to low-end smartphone market," Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said in a press release. "Chinese vendors are no longer followers. They are producing higher quality devices with appealing new hardware features that can rival the more established players in the mobile phone market."