7.1 Billion People, 7.1 Billion Mobile Phone Accounts Activated

Freshly Exhumed (105597) writes "Tomi Ahonen's newly released 2014 Almanac reveals such current mobile phone industry data gems as: 'The mobile subscription rate is at or very very nearly at 100%. For 7.1 Billion people alive that means 7.1 Billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide.' Compared with other tech industries, he says: 'Take every type of PC, including desktops, laptops, netbooks and tablet PCs and add them together. What do we have? 1.5 Billion in use worldwide. Mobile is nearly 5 times larger. Televisions? Sure. We are now at 2 Billion TV sets in use globally. But mobile has 3.5 times users.' Which mobile phone OS is the leader? ''Android has now utterly won the smartphone platform war with over 80% of new sales. Apple's iPhone has peaked and is in gradual decline at about 15% with the remnant few percent split among Windows, Blackberry and miscellaneous others.'"

Sanity check

[Russ1642]

Usually when you get a number like this you do a sanity check to make sure it's reasonable. This is so plainly obviously a BS number.

What this means

[Presto Vivace]

for my profession (public relations) is that if you don't have a mobile strategy, you don't have a communications strategy at all.

Re: Sanity check

[tysonedwards]

Actually, the "computer" count in the article was based on CPUs (x86 Processors from Intel and AMD) manufactured and sold through according to their financials, and made an assumption of one processor per "computer". So, unless you built your desktops upon PowerPC, Sparc or ARM, you've been counted. And on the phone front, it also refers to "Active Lines of Service" (billed phone numbers). Would be interesting to see the breakdown on a per country basis (even if only the biggies) to see "active lines of service" / "total population" = x

Not a BS number

[mcrbids]

That there are as many active mobile devices as there are people doesn't mean that everybody has a mobile device. And the reality is that mobile devices actually are ubiquitous, and the 7.1 billion number understates their ubiquity, since many devices are wifi only.

I type this on my Linux laptop that I use for work, but outside of some gaming, mobile devices have taken the crown for personal use. Mostly, I browse on my smart phone. I schedule on my smart phone. I email on my smart phone. My "TV" is actually a Google TV Stick running android. I frequently take a tablet with me when I travel, just so I can plug the hotel room HDMI into it and watch what I want, rather than "what's on".

Mobile devices are everywhere, and still growing fast, and have completely up-ended the computer marketplace. This trend will continue and even if you knock the number in half, it still stomps the every loving *!@#$* out of the classical desktop "computer".

Re:Sanity check

[Ralph Wiggam]

Lots of people without indoor toilets now have mobile phones.