Canalys has posted their Q4 2011 global smartphone research report and it appears that for the first time, ever, smartphones have outshipped PCs.
158.5 million smartphones were shipped during the quarter, for a total of 488 million on the year. The figure was a huge 63 percent jump from the 300 million shipped in 2010. PCs, on the other hand, only saw a 15 percent bump to 414.6 million units, including tablets like the iPad.
Says Canalys: “In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads. But pads have had negligible impact on smartphone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011. Smartphone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone.
In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition. The greater availability of smartphones at lower price points has helped tremendously, but there has been a driving trend of increasing consumer appetite for Internet browsing, content consumption and engaging with apps and services on mobile devices.”
Apple was the top smartphone and PC vendor during the quarter, selling 37 million iPhones, 15 million iPads and just over 5 million Macs. Altogether, the company shipped 93.1 million iPhones during the year, barely beating out Samsung who also finished strong and ended with 91.9 million smartphones shipped for the year.
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Result for: mobile phone market
Larry Page, co-founder of search giant Google has accused Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs of attempting to re-write history, and asserted that Google did not “follow” Apple into the mobile phone market. Page is referring to comments made by Jobs in February at an Apple town hall meeting, in which he blasted Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra as “bullshit” and accused the company of trying to kill the iPhone.
In a videotaped conference in June, Jobs echoed the same comments. However, Page has told Reuters that Jobs words are a “little bit of re-writing history.”
“We had been working on Android a very long time, with the notion of producing phones that are Internet enabled and have good browsers and all that because that did not exist in the marketplace,” Page said. “I think that characterization of us entering after is not really reasonable.”
Google acquired Android Inc., a mobile startup, in 2005 and announced its Android mobile operating system in November 2007. The iPhone had debuted in January of that year. After the Android OS was announced and handsets rolled out that featured the operating system, relations between the two tech giants soured increasingly.
At Google’s annual developers conference this year, vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said that Google developed Android to avoid a “Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device and one carrier would be our only choice.” Behind him, a picture read, “Not a Future We Want, 1984.”
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Result for: mobile phone market
America’s largest carrier, Verizon Wireless, has announced they have signed a deal with the NFL to stream live football games via the RedZone Channel over mobile phones.
The deal will last for the next four seasons, and will begin with the NFL draft in April.
Although unconfirmed, the deal is said to have been priced at $720 million.
The NFL has never had a deal of this caliber, preferring to broadcast games on TV, on CBS, FOX, and ESPN. Verizon continues to look at ways of bringing in new revenue, as the mobile phone market is near saturation in the United States.
