Competition hots up, smartphone shipments head to one billion

More bad news for PC makers. Business Insider Intelligence released their latest forecast of global smartphone sales, and the numbers are staggering. Recently, smartphone sales surpassed PC sales for the first time, and this year smartphone sales will nearly double PC sales.

According to IDC’s latest report on smart device shipments, we’re in for a record-breaking holiday season.

They’d make unhappy bedfellows but — taken together — Google’s Android platform and Apple’s iOS accounted for a record 92 per cent of global smartphone shipments in Q4 last year, according to new figures from analyst Strategy Analytics. The analyst estimates that 152.1 million Android smartphones were shipped globally in the quarter, nearly double the amount shipped i

  It’s no surprise that budget-level smartphones are beginning to gain the favor of consumers worldwide, but it appears there is an imminent explosion of budget-level devices in the coming years.

Evidence of market saturation in the U.S. can be seen in new research from IDC that takes a look at the global connected device market. Shipments and revenues declined here, even as worldwide market share grew. The connected device market, meaning smartphones, tablets, and PCs combined, grew 27.4% year-over-year in Q2 2012, IDC says. There was also a slight bump of 2.8% growth from Q1 to Q2.

For Q2 2012 smartphone sales, the throne is Samsung’s for now, but the market may be slowing down noticeably.

Written by: Peter Dinham | Published in: MarketThe world’s going mobile in a big way, moving sharply away from desktops and PCs to smartphones and tablets, with shipments in the fourth quarter of 2010 exceeding desktop and PC shipments, and last year an estimated 480 million smartphones and tablets shipped, compared to 380 million desktops and PCs. 

The Asia Pacific PC market is forecast to grow 20.3 percent this year to reach 114.6 million unit shipments, with spending on PCs in the region tipped to grow by 12.4 percent compared to a meagre 2.9 percent in 2009 due to a sharper decline in average selling prices for PCs last year.

Market analysts IDC says that Apple's iPhone is now outselling Nokia to take the lead in the smartphone market. Australian smartphone shipments have risen 67% year-on-year in Q3 2010 with over 60% of new mobiles now being smartphones, according to the results of their Q3 mobile device tracker.