According to Informa, about 786 million smartphones have been sold in the world this year, up 45 percent from 2011 sales.

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Another hitch, says Nicky Walton-Flynn of Informa, is that operators have lots of databases with information about their clients' habits that would be of great interest to advertisers.

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The company, a division of Informa, the publicly traded Swiss publishing and events company, trains sales teams in a method developed 30 years ago by Neil Rackham, an English behavioral psychologist.

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"If you look at Apple, their position of strength in the smartphone market has generally been in Europe and North America, " said Mark Newman, head telecoms analyst at research firm Informa.

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Sales in China of devices powered by Android already exceeded 50 percent in the first half of the year, and Informa estimates that two in every three handsets sold in the country over the whole of 2012 are powered by Android.

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