Billion people now own a smartphone
Twenty years of growth
The world smartphone usage total has passed the billion-unit point, the first time it has done so. It has taken 20 years, from the first appearance of the device in November 1992 to today.
Strategy Analytics, a market watcher, today said it reckons one in seven members of the world’s population has owned a smartphone during Q3 2012, with the usage figure hitting 1.038 billion during that three-month period.
The first smartphone: IBM's Simon
Source: Bill Buxton, the Buxton Collection
The first smartphone was IBM’s Simon, a device that premiered in November 1992 at the now defunct Comdex Fall show but which didn’t ship until 1994. Two years later, Nokia released the Nokia 9000 Communicator, a handset closer than the Simon to the devices we call smartphones today.
“Nokia remained a dominant force in smartphones for over a decade until the arrival of Apple’s iconic iPhone in 2007. The iPhone revolutionised smartphone design and it catalysed industry growth,” added SA’s Neil Mawston. “By the third quarter of 2011, we estimate there were 708 million smartphones in use worldwide.”
Nokia's 9000 Communicator: the first 'modern' smartphone
One year on, the figure has risen to over one billion. With six billion folk out there without a smartphone, there’s plenty more to sell in the coming years. Mawston forecast the two billion mark will be reached in 2015, just three years from now. ®
COMMENTS
Does that ...
.. Nokia 9000 smartphone have rounded corners?
Actually the iPhone...
Actually the iPhone more or less lowered the expectations we had of a smartphone. Before that the ability to run your own software was one of the main features of the smartphone distinguishing it from feature phones.
Luddites UNITE!!!
Graham,
I could not agree with you more. Beginning with the Pager and Fax Machine and now the Smartphone, these devices have all contributed to the downfall of civilized society. Unless my employer pays me 24/7/365 I will not be getting a smartphone so I can worry and work 24/7/365.
I have a truly great LG fliphone that is 6 years old and it can barely text. The chrome is worn off the front and some of the keys are getting hard to read. That damn phone will get a usable signal in the lower basement of a highrise or in the all stainless steel elevator of a hospital.
Co-workers smartphones can't get a signal in the same locations come hell or high water.
My kids insisted on texting me until I told them I won't text and if they want something they should call me on "The Phone". Who needs the Internet on a phone? Thats what computers are for and a damn sight easier to see what your doing on a real screen that does not make you lose even more of your eyesight.
Prediction: Come the year 2525 (courtesy of Zager and Evans) we "humans" will be hunchbacked, nearsighted mute gnomes with flipper hands except we will have developed polydactyl thumbs with little chiclet keyboard size fingers on each thumb. The human population will be in rapid decline as there will no longer be any face to face contact between us even if we were within feet of each other.
There's only one thing I can say:
Baaaaaaa.
I'll have my thick, woolly coat please.
