Mobile phone Growth Rates – Geographies, Platforms, and Applications

The PC turned 25 last year and now moves about 260M units per year. The growth increasingly comes from China and India and in particular the consumer market. The overall growth rate for the PC is 12% per year. Back in the day, it was over double that rate. By comparison, the mobile phone enjoys a much high growth rate around 40% per year worldwide with 60% to 70% growth in the emerging markets of India and China.

What people are doing with their mobile phones continues to expand into new areas. Mobile data is one interesting area. SMS remains the key application accounting for 75% of mobile data services according to this report. In the US it’s clear that we’re at the beginning of mobile data usage. The lack of easy to use and compelling services and applications holds back further adoption.

In this blog the author predicts everyone in the USA will have a mobile phone by 2013. That’s 100% usage compared to 84% at the end of 2007.

In researching this topic, I find it interesting that there’s a growth rate forecast for just about every geography (i.e. Africa, Pakistan, India, China, USA, etc) and just about every application such as music download, business productivity, etc and just about every platform including smartphone, Linux-based, and so forth. It appears there’s enough growth such that vendors can segment the market based on geography, application, and platform.

One trend that seems to be relevant to virtual instrumentation is the growth of the Linux-based Smartphone. There’s quite a range of choices on the market today. In fact, Linux now ships on over 20 million mobile phones. By overcoming several technical challenges such as boot-up time, memory footprint, and better performance than traditional RTOSes, Linux now offers a competitive alternative to Symbian and Windows-based platforms.

Best regards,
Hall T.