Good blog post from Daniel Pink on despite the fact that Smartphones are really hyped right now, they're also under-hyped.
The post is based on MIT Technology Review's interesting article Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster Than Any Technology in Human History. Key data from this article and lifted directly from Pink's blog post includes:
- In 2006, smart phones accounted for just 6% of U.S. mobile phones sold that year. Today, “smart phones represent more than two-thirds of all U.S. mobile-phone sales.”
- “In 1982, there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world — and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions.” Of those subscriptions, 73 percent are now in the developing world, even though those countries account for just 20 percent of the world’s GDP.”
- “According to IDC, smart phones accounted for 36 percent of global mobile-phone shipments in the first quarter of 2012, up from 25 percent a year earlier. If smart phones continue to gain at even this pace, ‘feature phones’ will be largely a memory in another five years.”
- Right now the world has 1.4 billion PCs in use. “Mobile phones, on the other hand, are already selling more than 1.4 billion units every single year.”
We write about Mobile Computing more than any other tech trend. It's hard to overestimate the speed at which mobile computing is expanding, so we certainly agree that this trend is under-hyped.
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