The Way Smartphones are Changing the World

It is absolutely undeniable that we are living in an era of smartphones. Despite their shortcomings, which are being polished over daily, smartphones have engrained themselves in most aspects of our lives, as the convenience they bring cannot be scoffed at even by the largest cynics. Seeing how allpervasive they are, we thought it might be a good idea to give you a bit of insight of what is currently going on with these devices, as well as some predictions on the direction in which they seem to be heading. With the rapid expansion that they have been making, one would expect fierce competition when it comes to smartphone manufacturers and OS providers. And while hardware preferences can still go in a number of directions, platforms used on these devices are much more clearly differentiated when it comes to the number of users. Even the two biggest players, iOS and Android are quite far apart if yuo consider the numbers. Android is definitely by far the most popular platform, being used by a stunning 51% of total smartphone users. They are followed by iOS with 24% of the global market, Symbian with 11%. BlackBerry with 9%, Bada with 2%, Microsoft with 2% and the remaining 1% of other platforms combined. Reasons for Android’s popularity are numerous, but the fact that it is an open system, available on number of carriers and in a number of countries where people still don’t have access to Apple’s products are probably among the most important ones. Currently, the number of smartphone users in the world is estimated at approximately 1,200,000,000 people, and the predictions are placing this number at 2 billion in 2015. When one considers the rate of their growth up to this point, this prediction doesn’t really look too farfetched. In the year 2012, somewhere around a half of all Americans and Europeans have used a smartphone app at least once to make a purchase and it is believed that by the 2015 mobile retail sales will make up for 24% of the total world e commerce sales. Making payments over smartphones is getting more secure by the day, and more people are warming up to the idea. To rally grasp the growth rate of this industry, here are some facts which illustrate the point. During the last three years somewhere around 500,000 smartphone applications have been developed and the Apple store itself has had more than 50 billion app downloads, even when you take the fact that some of the apps are free into account, the amount of money going through the store is amazing. Speaking of money, it is estimated that by 2015, sales of smartphones will reach $77 billion. It is also interesting to note that each day, over 300 million video clips are watched on smartphones by users from all over the world, and the every minute 1.3 million people use their smartphones to connect to Wi Fi.