Six out of every 10 people alive on Earth, including children, the elderly and people in developing countries, now have a mobile phone, with one in every four mobile phone owners worldwide now owning a smartphone, according to startling new figures on the worldwide mobile phone market.
The figures, compiled in the 2012 edition of Tomi Ahonen Consulting’s Tomi Ahonen Phone Book, estimates that for a total global population of around 7.1 billion people there are 6.7 billion mobile devices including mobile phones and tablets, equating to 94 mobile devices for every 100 people alive on Earth today.
In total, there are around 5.3 billion mobile phone handsets in use, with 4.3 billion mobile phone users, representing 61% of the entire human race.
The figures also point to the remarkable growth of the smartphone sector, with 1.3 billion smartphones in use, representing roughly a quarter of all mobile phones, with three quarters of all mobile phone users worldwide still relying on a featurephone. In contrast, there are about 1.6 billion PCs of any kind, including desktop PCs, laptops and tablets.
Of those 1.3 billion smartphones, around 53% (710 million) use Android, meaning that there is one Android smartphone in use for every 10 people alive anywhere in the world.
Apple iOS comes in a distant second with a global installed base of around 260 million or 19% of the worldwide smartphone market.
The remaining top five smartphone platforms worldwide are Symbian (190 million and 14% of all smartphones), BlackBerry (104 million smartphones and 14%), Samsung’s low-cost bada platform (30 million and 2%). Windows Phone has an installed base of around 20 million worldwide, representing just 2% of the global installed base.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
