Ahh, the humble smartphone. For the first part of the last decade a mere curiosity reserved for the hardcore nerds and obsessive businessman of this world, subsequently thrust into the limelight by the iPhone, then Android, and most recently by the escalating war between the two.
Increasingly higher investment in the growing sector combined with massive marketing budgets has seen sales of the now-eponymous devices skyrocket in the last two years.
In the last three months of 2009 smartphone manufacturers managed to shift 53.9 million devices, which is a fairly respectable amount. However in the last quarter of 2010 that number almost doubled to 100.9 million. For the whole of 2010 just over 300 million handsets were sold to excited consumers.
PC shipments, by contrast, were cooling off a bit, managing only 5.5% growth in Q4 2010 from the same period a year previously. For the quarter PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units, putting the smartphone – which is increasingly filling in for a full-blown PC (and sometimes even becoming one) – out in front for the quarter.
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