No matter how much we cover mobile computing, it seems in many ways we continue to underestimate its impact.
Recode's Big Smartphones Ate the Tablet Market big phones are defined as those with screens "between 5 inches and 6 inches in diagonal (an iPhone 7 Plus measures 5.5 inches diagonally)."
They report that in India and China almost 2/3rds of all smartphones are big. And while only In the U.S. only 33% of smartphones are big, they are rapidly gaining share.
The net result, as the Recode chart below shows, is tablet sales have slowed and are projected to decline about 1% per year over the next 5 years. Meanwhile, smartphone sales are forecast to continue to grow at about 7% per year.
This makes perfectly sense. Why buy a tablet if your phone is also effectively a tablet.
The interesting 2nd order impact of this shift is related to online video.
Also from Recode, Ad spending on mobile video will reach $18 billion next year, surpassing desktop shows the stunning growth of mobile video viewing. This, of course, is mostly done on smartphones.
This shift is verified by the mobile usage growth Netflix is experiencing. Recode's Netflix is getting a big boost in subscribers from mobile (and yes, it is Recode day here) nicely covers this. Key quote:
Americans spent about 7.5 billion minutes watching Netflix on their phones in June of 2017, according to data from media measurement company ComScore, up 73 percent since 2014.
As we reported last year, it's a mobile world and will continue to become even more so.
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