Credit Suisse recently projected that total smartphone sales for 2009 will end up at around 176 million units. In the years ahead, Credit Suisse expects the smartphone market to balloon to around 1.5 billion units. By comparison, worldwide unit sales of all mobile phones in 2009 will be about 1.2 billion and worldwide unit sales of all PCs in 2009 will be about 300 million. Credit Suisse commented: “We believe smartphones represent one of the most attractive secular trends in technology.” (In this context, “secular” means not tied to just one vendor.)
Beyond smartphone applications, there are several additional forces at work that are going to drive the growth of the smartphone market:
- Mobile broadband - The rise of 4G on WiMAX and LTE will bring multi-megabit broadband Internet to the same airwaves that people are currently using for mobile voice service and pedestrian Internet services such as EDGE and 3G. This next generation of mobile broadband will unleash a new wave of software applications and video services on smartphones. It will also enable augmented reality software to let smartphones interact with the real world.
- Emerging economies - In countries that have largely missed the PC revolution so far but will be be joining the global civilization in a more connected way, many citizens will not be jumping on the information superhighway with a PC - the power grid and Internet infrastructure are still too spotty and underdeveloped in many areas. Instead, the mobile phone will become their PC, because cellular towers are much easier and cheaper to deploy and there are inexpensive ways to generate small bursts of recharging power (remember the hand crank on the OLPC?).
- All mobile phones become smartphones - The definition and form factor of the smartphone has certainly expanded. It’s no longer just a mobile phone with a qwerty keyboard. There are now smartphones with nothing but virtual keyboards (iPhone, HTC MyTouch) and clamshell smartphones with more traditional keypads (BlackBerry Pearl Flip). Today’s smartphones are more about an advanced mobile OS under the hood. Thus, all mobile phones will naturally become smartphones as their underlying software takes on more advanced functions and vendors become less likely to build their own OS and more likely to use an open source mobile OS like Android or license Windows Mobile or Palm’s webOS.
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