The Blackberry Playbook
Superlatives and Hyperbole are common in any discussion of the mobile explosion. Smartphones are rapidly replacing ordinary cell phones as the default communications device on wireless networks. Mobile phone numbers are rapidly replacing old-fashioned landline phone numbers for consumers. In fact, during the keynote presentation at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s recent Annual Leadership meeting, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google (until April) stated that Mobile use is “…growing faster than all of Google’s internal predictions.” That is a huge statement by itself. One of the statistics he cited was the fact that YouTube has over 200 million mobile video playbacks per day.
Just the Facts Ma-am
According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, which is now best known as the “CTIA-The Wireless Association,” in 2005, 7.7 percent of households were wireless only. By 2010, the total had risen to 24.5 percent, a number that does not fully reflect the smartphone explosion. Additionally, tablets are a nascent market projected to race past laptops as the primary mobile data platform in sales, and soon. As to the total wireless phones in the United States, the numbers are more striking. In 2005 there were 194 million wireless subscribers, or a total of 66 percent of the total population. As of 2010, that number had ballooned to 292 million subscribers, or 93 percent of the total population.
Again, these numbers, compiled in June of 2010, do not reflect the smartphone explosion. Most of the smartphone sales come from existing cell phone customers trading up to the new platform, but to get some sense of scale consider the money trail. From 2005 to 2010, total wireless revenue jumped by 50 percent from $108 billion to $155 billion. Wireless data revenue, the most accurate measure of smartphone activity, increased an astounding 550 percent, from a low of $8.5 billion to over $46 billion, and now represents nearly one third of the total wireless revenue in the U.S..
Where Will it End?
Nobody is willing to predict if there is any end in sight and very soon, smartphones will have surpassed cell phones, which are now referred to as “Feature Phones,” in total number. Then there is the tablet; the iPad is well established as a successful platform and has spawned a sudden population explosion of Android based tablets. This is significant in that Google has only just released Honeycomb, the Android 3.0 Operating System that is specifically built for tablets. This will have the effect of further expanding the mobile user base as laptop luggers convert to tablet tote’ers.
In his speech at the IAB meeting, Eric Schmidt further predicted that the mobile explosion could quadruple the total display advertising market to over 200 billion dollars a year. Superlatives and Hyperbole. The future will no doubt be mobile. In just a few years, wires could actually become a thing of the past, along with printed publications and many other things. The most recent estimates put the Internet population at 2 billion, which is almost one third of the human race. Over the next few years, as mobile data and voice penetration expand to other areas of the world, this could reach half of the world or more.
