I’ll Take One Smartphone and Two Dumb Ones: High-End Handsets Grab More Marketshare
by Peter Kafka
Posted on August 19, 2009 at 6:12 AM PT
From the “that makes sense” file: Smartphones like the iPhone and Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry now account for almost one in three phones sold in the U.S.
That bit of data comes from a new NPD Group report, which says that smartphones market share reached 28 percent in Q2 of 2009, up 47 percent over the last year.
Which isn’t a shock, since the phones continue to get better and cheaper–remember when Apple’s (AAPL) first iPhone cost $600, all the way back in 2007? And all sorts of players, from mom-and-pop software developers to manufacturers like Palm, (PALM) have bet their business on the notion that one day not that far from now, nearly every phone will be a smartphone.
But in the meantime, “feature phones,” the plain vanilla handsets that you almost never read about on this site or any other tech-focused publication, continue to dominate the market, which continues to expand. NPD says sales volume increased 18 percent, revenue increased 18 percent, and the average sales price for new phones increased four percent, to $87 a pop.
[Image credit: cod_gabriel]
Comments
Right — the entire “smartphone” category has turned into at least a bit of an artifice. Given a choice, wouldn’t everyone rather have a good (read: smart) mobile phone? They aren’t just for geeks anymore.
The real barrier now is the cost of the plans.
Posted by Mitch Stone at August 19th, 2009 at 10:27 am