No, not everyone has a smartphone -- or wants one. But smartphones are becoming a whole lot more popular, according to new numbers released by market researcher IDC.
Worldwide, companies shipped 54.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, IDC. That's a record level, up 39 percent from the same quarter in 2008. For the whole year, 174.2 million smartphones were shipped, up 15.1 percent from 2008.
"Four of the top five vendors established new shipment records for a single quarter, indicating strong demand in the market," Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team, said in a statement released by IDC. "Increasingly, mobile phone users are seeking greater utility from their devices beyond telephony and messaging, and converged mobile devices fulfill that need. To help address demand, carriers took advantage of lower prices on many older devices, ordering additional units and, in turn, offering reduced prices to end users. It was the perfect set of conditions to push shipments to a record level."
Nokia leads the smartphone market worldwide, followed by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Apple is in third place, but the company saw shipments of the iPhone leap dramatically in 2009. In the fourth quarter of 2009, Apple shipped 8.7 million iPhones, an increase of 98 percent over the same period in 2008.
Still, smartphones (which IDC calls "converged mobile devices") only accounted for just over 15 percent of all mobile phones shipped in 2009. That is up from 2008, though, when smartphone accounted for just under 13 percent of the mobile phone market.
Image © Apple
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