Ahh, the humble smart phone. For the first part of the last decade a mere curiosity reserved for the hardcore nerds and obsessive businessman of this world, subsequently thrust into the limelight by the iPhone, then Android, and most recently by the escalating war between the two.
Increasingly higher investment in the growing sector combined with massive marketing budgets has seen sales of the now-eponymous devices skyrocket in the last two years.
In the last three months of 2009 smart phone manufacturers managed to shift 53.9 million devices, which is a fairly respectable amount. However in the last quarter of 2010 that number almost doubled to 100.9 million. For the whole of 2010 just over 300 million handsets were sold to excited consumers.
PC shipments, by contrast, were cooling off a bit, managing only 5.5% growth in Q4 2010 from the same period a year previously. For the quarter PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units, putting the smart phone, which is increasingly filling in for a full-blown PC (and sometimes even becoming one), out in front for the quarter.
In fact the news was overwhelmingly positive for the smart phone sector – all of the big players saw substantial growth, even Nokia Corp. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. managed a frankly astonishing 439% year-on-year increase for the quarter, largely off the back of the success of their Galaxy S line on Android devices – we imagine they’ll be breaking out the soju in Seoul tonight.
One surprise from the report was that Nokia, despite continuing indecisiveness about their direction and shedding staff, sold over 100 million devices, more than doubling the sales of Research In Motion Ltd., who sat in second place with 48.8 million. Perhaps they were onto something with all that “emerging markets” talk we saw at Nokia World.
You can read the full IDC report here.
Via ReadWriteWeb
