Smartphones

Smartphones are continuing their upward trend in sales and volume. More and more people are starting to replace their bulkier PC’s for the convenience and mobility of smartphones that for the most part could handle most of the functions they need. The rapidly growing mobile internet infrastructure also contributes to the success of smartphones and WiFi/3G/4G enabled devices including products such as the iPad. The worldwide market for smartphones is expected to grow 55.4% this year compared to 2009.

Smartphone vendors are expected to ship 269.6 million converged mobile devices this year compared to the 173.5 million units shipped in 2009. This increase could be explained by the launch of several new smartphone models such as the iPhone 4, Blackberry Torch and the EVO 4G to name a few.

To put this increase in context, in the first half of 2010, vendors shipped of 119.4 million smartphones or 55.5% more than the 76.8 million smartphones shipped during the first half of 2009. This growth is showing no signs of slowing down either, the outlook for 2011 is also very strong. The smartphone market is expected to increase 24.5% in 2011.

In terms of the operating systems running these smartphones, Symbian and Android will dominate the mobile operating system market by 2014 according to research firm Gartner. They expect that Symbian and Android will combine to form 59.8% of the total mobile OS market by 2014. Symbian will hold the slight advantage with 30.2% versus Android’s 29.6%.

They also expect BlackBerry OS’s market share to drop from 19.9% in 2009 to 11.7% in 2014. Despite the drop in relative market share, it should also be noted that by 2014 there will be a significant increase in the number of smartphones in the market, so despite a smaller percentage, their volume is expected to increase dramatically.