We’ve regularly covered research showing the rapid growth of Android smartphones, but IDC’s latest stats hammer home the trend even more starkly.

Its figures for global smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2012 show Android with a whopping 75% market share – 136m of the 181.1m total smartphones shipped during the quarter.

iOS takes second place with 26.9m iPhones shipped and a 14.9% market share, followed by BlackBerry (7.7m / 4.3%), Symbian (4.1m / 2.3%) and Windows Phone (3.6m / 2%).

Android shipments grew 91.5% year-on-year, compared to 46.4% for the overall smartphone market.

“By comparison, Android’s total volumes for the quarter were greater than the total number of smartphones shipped in 2007, the year that Android was officially announced,” notes IDC in its announcement.

The obligatory caveat for all these platforms: these are estimated shipments, rather than sales to actual people.