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Smartphone sales overtake feature phones at last

Remember when laptops outsold desktop PCs for the first time? How remarkable, it seemed, that the world could have changed so fast. According to Gartner another milestone in the evolution of tech has just been passed: smartphones outsold non-smartphones for the first time in 2013.

The analysts reckon that just under a billion smartphones were sold to end users (an important distinction compared to ‘shipped’) worldwide over the course of last year (968 million, to be precise), which in itself marks a rise of 42.3% over the number sold in 2012. In total, smartphones made up 53.6% of total phone sales.

The lion’s share, naturally, went to Samsung and Google. According to Gartner, the Korean beast increased its overall marketshare from 30.3% to 31.3%, increasing the number of phones sold to end users from 205 767 000 to just under 300 million. The second largest manufacturer, Apple, saw its share of total sales drop from 19.1% to 15.6%, or 151m iPhones.

Gartners smartphone sales over 2013 by brand.
Gartners smartphone sales over 2013 by brand.

By comparison with these two, however, the next most popular brand was Huawei which sold 46 million smartphones. Poor old HTC – a one time market leader – dropped into the ‘Others’ category.

In terms of operating system, 78.4% of all smartphones sold ran Android, while 15.6% ran iOS. Just 3.2% of sales were for Windows Phone and despite its high profile launches, BlackBerry dropped below 2%.

 

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