Smartphones are what everyone’s using, right? Wrong. While Smartphones are undeniably popular in certain markets, from a worldwide perspective, only slightly more than a quarter of phones are smartphones. That’s a whole lot of WAP still going on.
Vision Mobile’s report on global mobile trends suggests that while markets with strong 3G penetration have higher smartphone uptake (which makes perfect sense; a smartphone on 2G is somewhat lobotomised), there’s still a long way to go before we’re a smartphone planet; even locally in the Asia-Pacific region, smartphone penetration is only at 19 per cent. [Vision Mobile via TechCrunch]
Image: Vision Mobile
Thorbjørn
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 3:32 PMNow what would the numbers be if you only include say US, Australia and Western Europe?
RB
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 3:35 PMthat wouldn’t make it a “report on global mobile trends” tho would it ;)
Mike
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 3:40 PMSmartphones only became popular once Apple started making them 2007. So 4 year’s. Mobile phones have been around twenty year’s. I hesitated when 3G started in this country in say 2005, because i thought the phone’s were big and ugly i liked my compact lg clamshell. Sure time’s have changed and now i want to get a HTC Titan. Thats because i want to have a PC in my pocket even if i have to wear cargo short’s to accomadate it. I like to be able to tweet or google wherever i maybe. There are a lot of people who do not care to tweet or what not and still prefer to comunicate verbally.
olearymo
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 4:03 PMThat’s a very subjective statement. It really depends on your definition of ‘popular’ is. There were plenty of ‘smartphones’ around before the iPhone. Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones were quite popular I seem to remember. I remember seeing them quite often. Perhaps not quite as often as iPhones and Androids, but still.
Perhaps ‘Smartphones only reached their current popularity once Apple started making them’ would be a bit more accurate.
Steve
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 4:19 PMIll go out on a limb, and say its not so much that apple made smartphones popular, it’s that every so called “smartphone” that came before iPhone, was not very smart at all.
Nokia pre iPhone? LOLsmart.
Steve
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 6:41 PMHi fake Steve.
Do you know what a smartphone is? The ‘smart’ prefix is not some arbitrary medal based whether it’s user-friendly or not, but rather accepted nomenclature for a range of products that possess a feature-set that (generally) includes: Apps, calling, wireless internet, organising etc.
Yes, the pre-iPhone Nokias were smartphones, you don’t just come up with something like the iPhone out of thin air. You build upon the shoulders of previous innovations such as Nokia’s. At the iPhone’s launch, it was the first consumer-friendly, populist smartphone but was still prohibitively expensive for most, like all smartphones on the market then. Because of tech and infrastructure limitations, the manufacturers HAD to target businessmen and executives. The iPhone didn’t invent this market you ignorant fool.
CapslockFury
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 5:10 PMyeah because before 2007 blackberry hadn’t done anything, it must have been Apple bringing the smartphone to the masses. What a bunch of goddamn heroes.
TSH
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 3:43 PM“Feature” vs. “Smart” is really just a question of how sophisticated is the phone’s OS. Many of Nokia’s S40 feature phones include 3G and WiFi; plus S40 supports Java for extra apps and tethering to extend the phone. They’re capable little devices and really, they offer everything most users need.
http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=2424&idPhone2=4279
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_x3_02_touch_and_type-3479.php
The Gremlin
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 4:26 PM“That’s a whole lot of WAP still going on.” I’d bet a significat portion of those feature phone users don’t use data at all. I wonder what the percentage is
awallafashagba
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 4:51 PMgroovy pic !
Sicarius123
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 6:59 PMI was still using a 6230i until the 3G-S launched.
Before that I felt that smartphones were slow, massively expensive, and 3G data was also expensive. Not to mention the software was terrible. Symbian? Blackberry OS? iOS 2? Windows Mobile 6? Yuck!
I’d rather a phone that handled calls and SMS perfectly, than a phone that tried to do a lot and did it badly.
The 3G-S was the first smart phone that actually ran smoothly enough for me to consider a good product, combined with the exact time that 3G data prices dropped. Now we are spoilt for choice with Windows Phone, iPhone and Android.