Looking beyond the killer quote that ABI Research gave to TechCrunch to describe the current smartphone market of Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry 10, there's a smart projection of market share into 2013. There's not going to be any major shift, but in terms of unit sales Windows Phone is charted to reach 45 million handset sales by the end of the year.

By the end of 2013, there will be 45 million Windows Phone devices, and 20 million BlackBerry 10 devices in use worldwide, ABI predicts. These respectively work out to 3.2 percent and 1.4 percent shares of the market. That may sound like peanuts compared with Android’s 798 million handsets (57 percent share) or iOS’s 294 million devices (21 percent share). But this will continue to remain just enough to keep a critical mass of developers interested in the platform — significant because apps will continue to be one of the main drivers for why consumers buy phones, says ABI.

While that makes for a rather low market share percentage, it's worth pointing out that 45 million handsets in a year is still a lot of handsets, and should provide developers with enough of a base to effectively monetise, provide a broad enough spectrum to make carrier support worthwhile, and of course bring in significant capital to the hardware manufacturers.

Read the full discourse over on TechCrunch.