Smart Phones Take The Lead

Smart phones now hold the lead, annually, for the type of computer most sold and shipped (world wide).  Last year 700 million smart phones were shipped by all manufacturers. That’s nearly double the shipments of PC’s, which was about 352 million.

With 352 million new PC’s shipped a year, wouldn’t you think they could come up with newer, nicer models?  Dell is supposedly going private due to low profits or something, and HP says they don’t make money on PC’s.  So, who is?  352 million is a lot of anything.  Most likely the shipments are half notebook computers which are still selling fairly well I think.

And what do the buyers of those 700 million smart phone computers do with them?  Other than email and Facebook, it appears they mostly use them to play games.  Gaming app’s are the best sellers for iPhone and Android.  Candy Crush Saga is the #1 seller in app stores – both Android and Apple.  How crazy it is to me that you would want to play games on a $550 device the size of your palm – surely there is something better to do with your time, right?

But the top app by “share of your face time” on the smart phone is Facebook,. It is so far in the lead there is no comparison. On average smart phone users are on Facebook 24 % of their time. and I Tunes 8 % and then Pandora 8%  Everything else is 3 % or less.  I was surprised that YouTube is only 2 % of typical owner’s time.  And I think it is one of the better things on the smart phone (at times, anyway).

HTC will soon by out with a smart phone whose home screen is Facebook themed, so you can spend even more of your smart phone time on Facebook than the “average” owner.