Are we there yet? Smart phone uptick detected

One well-worn mantra has it that long-awaited growth in data-driven revenue depends on smart phone uptake, a notion that keeps this market segment under the microscope. Thus, when NPD Group detected more than 4-percent growth in smart-phone sales in the United States between January and October this year, it called attention to the data.
“More planets are lining up” for smart phone uptake, according to analyst Neil Strother at NPD. “We’re at 6 percent, not the magical 10 percent, which is one of my own benchmarks for a trend.”
In January smart-phone sales accounted for nearly 2 percent of U.S. mobile handset sales and, by October, that number had reached more than 6 percent, according to NPD’s online surveys of 4,000 to 6,000 mobile subscribers.
Strother attributed the increase to a range of factors, led by an average price drop of 10 percent for smart phones in the cited, 10-month period. The analyst noted that mobile e-mail usage is on the upswing, devices’ data capacity is up through onboard memory or memory cards and carriers have touted their network upgrades. The launch of numerous smart slabs with multimedia features wedded to productivity functions such as e-mail, some with QWERTY keypads-think Moto Q, Nokia E62, BlackBerry Pearl, et al-also has drawn attention to the smart device segment, Strother said.
“The form factor of a QWERTY keypad, tending toward thin, is more acceptable to consumers,” Strother said. “Carriers’ marketing pitch is that these are cool devices and some people are saying, ‘Yeah, it’s worth it to me.'”
NPD data shows that for the first 10 months of this year, the top five selling smart devices in the U.S. are the Moto Q, Palm Treo 650, Verizon Wireless’ XV6700, Palm Treo 700p and the BlackBerry 8700.
Strother acknowledged that, at 6 percent, the exclamation of “trend!” depends on more data, notably the next two quarters.
The reason to get goosey over an uptick in smart phone sales? According to NPD, smart-phone users spent an average of $6.31 on wireless data in the third quarter, vs. 89 cents for owners of all types of devices.
“It’s not a ton of people, but it’s creeping up,” Strother said. “Actually, this growth has been slower in coming than I’d originally projected. But if a higher number of people are buying these devices and using data, they’re reinforcing the carriers’ decisions to investment in upgrading their networks.”