Half of All Mobile Phones Will Be Smartphones by 2013, Two Years Earlier Than Forecast
Those smartphones are growing up so fast. — It seems like just yesterday they were sending their first emails from their baby keyboards, and now they are poised to take over the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
The forecast revision lands on top of an arc that has been building since late 2010, when Fortune argued 2011 would be the year Android explodes — a call that looked aggressive then and now reads conservative. In May 2012, Technology Review framed smartphones as possibly spreading faster than any technology in human history, and this new projection is the quantitative version of that claim: half of all phones sold will be smartphones by 2013, two years ahead of the previous forecast.
The pickup was unusually broad for a forecast story — Computerworld, GigaOM, Ars Technica, ZDNet and Tech Trader Daily all ran it the same week — which signals how much planning across the industry was keyed to the old timeline.
First-order effects
- Forecasters' own models are now behind the market: anyone building handsets, components or carrier inventory against the old 2015 crossover date is planning for a market that arrives two years early.
- Android, already positioned by the 2010 coverage as the volume platform, stands to capture the largest share of the incremental hundreds of millions of units the accelerated timeline implies.
Second-order effects
- Feature-phone-centric handset makers face a compressed window to reposition their lineups before their core category shrinks to the minority of sales.
- Component and semiconductor suppliers shift capacity toward smartphone-class parts sooner, tightening supply for the low end and pulling down the bill-of-materials threshold for what counts as a smartphone.
Third-order effects
- If each successive forecast keeps being beaten by roughly two years, the structural endpoint is a phone market that is effectively all-smartphone well within the decade, with 'feature phone' surviving only as an entry-level price tier rather than a separate product class.
- A market where smartphones are the majority of units sold makes mobile the default computing platform for first-time internet users globally, resetting where software, services and advertising dollars get built.
The trend: Smartphone adoption is outrunning every prior consumer-technology diffusion curve, with industry forecasts serially underestimating the crossover date.