Smartphones

SMARTPHONES

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The impact of smartphones

The smartphone is rapidly accelerating the convergence of computing and telephony and taking the phone as a converged music player, gaming device, camera, GPS navigator, web browser and wallet to another level.

It is also beginning to disrupt some cosy legacy marketing value chains, for example, in the traditional retail space savvy smartphone owners are increasingly engaging in in-store price comparison behaviour.

Operating systems from Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Apple, Nokia (Symbian), Palm and now Android (driven by Google) combined with some pretty sexy hardware from a range of vendors are radically changing the way that people work, play, consume and create information.

Being within arm’s reach of most of the information you need and desire 24/7 creates a level of stickiness which is almost addictive and probably also makes us pretty lazy.

Various smartphones

The appearance of smartphones have improved rapidly from the normal phones and they are much more attractive.

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When posed with the question what caused the sudden craze in the development of smartphones within different brands researchers found:

The recent emergence of the Apple iPhone, which has truly transformed the way we think about the mobile ‘phone’ and has forced competitors in the hardware, software and mobile operator space to raise their game. It has also forced a wave of innovation (and reverse engineering!) which has made a lot of very powerful products available at increasingly affordable prices.Add to this the Apple application store which, on 23 April 2009, saw its billionth application download – ranging from utilities like weather, navigators and song identifiers to games and information resources – there are over 35 000 applications available in the App Store.The success of the Apple application store has driven a range of competitors like Blackberry, Nokia and Google to follow suit and the recently announced Vodafone application store clearly signals the determination of mobile operators not to be marginalised by the Internet and handset brands.

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Smartphone Stats • Nielsen report that 31% of US mobile phone owners have a smartphone

as of December 2010, and expect smartphones to become the majority by the end of 2011. eMarketer predicts that smartphone ownership will reach 43% of the US mobile population by 2015.

• According to figures for 2010 released by Gartner, smartphones accounted for 297 million (19%) of the 1.6 billion mobile phones sold that year. That's 72.1% more smartphone sales than in 2009.

• The same company expects US sales of smartphones to grow from 67 million in 2010 to 95 million in 2011, and become the highest-selling consumer electronic device category.

• For Q4 2010, the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker puts smartphone sales at 100.9 million, up some 87% over Q4 2009. They report total smartphone sales for 2010 as 302.6 million, up around 74% on 2009.

• The Coda Research Consultancy predict global smartphone sales of some 2.5 billion over the 2010-2015 period, and also suggest that mobile Internet use via smartphones will increase 50 fold by the end of that period.

• Morgan Stanley Research estimates sales of smartphones will exceed those of PCs in 2012.

• Gartner expect over 500 million smartphones to sell in 2012

Extra stats

Source: Gartner (Feb 2011)Sales of smartphones using the Android OS jumped almost 900% compared to 2009.

Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Jan 27, 2011

Researched facts

Slightly more males than females are getting smartphones (53% versus 47%) which is what we would expect for technical early adopter products. In terms of demographics, Hispanic Americans and Asians are slightly more likely to have a smartphone than what their share of population would indicate, which is a trend we see in the adoption of other mobile data services. While smartphones started out in the business segment, two-third of today’s buyers of smartphones are personal users.

features Smartphones show higher application usage

than feature phones even at the basic built-in application level. During Nielsen’s Mobile Insights survey we asked the respondents about features they’ve used in the last 30 days. The good news for the smartphone market is that people are actually taking advantage of the device capabilities.

The percentage of people who use their phone for only voice communications drops from 14% among new feature phone owners to 3% of smartphone owners. The use of the built-in camera and video capability jumps by almost 20% for both categories, due to the generally better quality and user friendliness of the features. Smartphones also often have a better speaker which translates into more frequent usage from about half of feature phone owners to about two-thirds of smartphone owners. Not surprisingly the use of Wi-Fi increases 10-fold from 5% for feature phone owners to 50% for smartphone users to satisfy the need for fast downloads.

Conclusion Overall smartphones in my opinion smartphones have more pro’s than

cons and therefore they benefit individuals more and make their day-to-day activities easier

Smartphones also: Make the usage of internet easier They help with navigation The help by storing your work Downloading important documents and for entertainment purposes They also help with transferring documents, work or accessories from

one person to another.

Therefore smartphones have benefited individuals in a better and more positive way.

Smartphones

Reference • www.rickjoubert.com/?p=30 •

www.email-marketing-reports.com/wireless.../smartphone-statistics.htm

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Smartphones

Done by:Dalitso Mukumbe