Mobile platform vendor Symbian said Wednesday that shipments of mobile phones using its platform increased 131 percent in the third quarter of this year compared to the same quarter a year ago.

The company said 8.54 million phones using variations of the Symbian OS shipped in the third quarter of this year compared to 3.7 million in the year-ago quarter. About 7.8 million Symbian-based phones shipped in the second quarter of this year.

Total shipments of Symbian phones for the year to-date now total more than 23 million, the company said.

Numerous market studies have shown an enormous worldwide lead by Symbian-based devices compared to devices based on other platforms such as Linux, the Palm OS and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platforms. However, recent studies have shown Linux and Windows Mobile starting to catch up.