Smartphone growth worldwide, particularly outside Europe and the US, helped lift the overall market to the new first-quarter high. Increasingly, mobile phone makers and carriers are making smartphones affordable to a wider variety of people, which has helped drive the market.
"The growth of companies outside the top five vendors — vendors in the 'Others' category, such as Micromax, TCL-Alcatel, Huawei and Research In Motion — shows that the overall market is still very much ripe for share gains," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.
Feature phones still represent the majority of mobile phone shipments, but smartphones are the future. IDC expects almost all of the worldwide mobile phone market's growth to be driven by smartphones through 2015. Since the start of 2011, IDC found that Middle East and African markets performed well on a year-over-year basis despite civil unrest in some countries, such as Egypt, where sales were negatively impacted by the turbulence. Nokia and Research In Motion performed best in these markets overall.
With the increasing sale of smartphones and tablet computers, the app battles have picked up pace. ABI Research noted that Android and Windows Phone 7 app downloads are steadily catching up with Apple. The analysts expect that there will be 44 billion cumulative app downloads by 2016.
“Given the vast number of choices available, app developers and app stores need to innovate continually in order to maintain consumers’ interest,” commented ABI research analyst Fei Feng Seet. “For example, an app called OfferedApp promises to provide a paid app each day in exchange for users completing a simple survey or signing up for an offer with advertisers. Some apps also offer virtual currency or other premiums to consumers who download a featured app from the developer. However these new marketing tactics are likely to face opposition as iTunes starts to clamp down on such incentivized promotions when they cut into Apple’s revenue from in-app sales.”
