7.1 Billion People, 7.1 Billion Mobile Phone Accounts Activated 197
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sanity check (Score:5, Informative)
These are telecommunications companies. Sanity doesn't figure in to their business plan.
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These are telecommunications companies. Sanity doesn't figure in to their business plan.
You have clearly never worked for an investment bank.
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.. or the RIAA.
Re:Sanity check (Score:5, Informative)
It's got nothing to do with that. As the GP said, this is a total BS interpretation of the statistic. In wireless telco parlance, a "subscriber" is just an active SIM, not a person. So the total # of "subscribers" among mobile systems includes not just cellular phones but also cellular wireless enabled laptops/tablets/Kindles; all the cars out there with OnStar or something similar; every truck or car with a wireless fleet tracker; every cargo container or physical asset that has a wireless location/anti-theft tracker; every FedEx driver who has a cellular-enabled signature capture reader; every utility meter or security camera with a cellular data link... the list goes on and on. "7.1 billion" is probably more like 1/2 people with phones and 1/2 "things" with cellular connections.
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The richest countries would have to have ten devices per person ON AVERAGE to make up for the large portion of the population that doesn't have any, let alone clean toilets. I just don't see how that's the case.
Re:Sanity check (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people without indoor toilets now have mobile phones.
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And some of those mobile phones end up in toilets .. and the user says the phone stopped working and possibly has "water damage", while not mentioning that whole toilet incident...
Not that I'm speaking from experience..
Re:Sanity check (Score:4, Informative)
I assume you're trolling.
If not, it flush toilets require a massive amount of infrastructure spending that is not available in lots of places. Cell service can be rolled out to a large number of people much more easily. This if often the case in India and southeast Asia. Last time I checked, there were minimal Negros in that part of the world.
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And individual can't buy a flush toilet. An individual can buy a phone.
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Pity you can't read.
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- One person cell phone
- One work issued cell phone
- One medical device that has a cellular connection to a service provider
- One security system that has a mobile module in it
- Two kindles, one 2nd generation, and one DX both of which connect via cellular
So right there I account for six "subscriptions."
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Indeed, they probably count all the smart electric meters out there too!
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And security systems. In the last house the security company had a cell phone mounted in the panel.
[John]
Not a BS number (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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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".
It's funny, but I dislike using my phone for basically all of those things, and so I don't. IMHO, typing on a smart phone is much like trying to assemble Christmas toys while drunk; not pleasurable, and noteworthy mainly for the occasional disaster it causes.
On the other hand, if you go to places like Mumbai or Beijing, everyone appears to have a cell phone, and appears to use it constantly, so I can believe the overall number (well, to within a factor of 2 or so for hype inflation).
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It's got nothing to do with that. As the GP said, this is a total BS interpretation of the statistic. In wireless telco parlance, a "subscriber" is just an active SIM, not a person. So the total # of "subscribers" among mobile systems includes not just cellular phones but also cellular wireless enabled laptops/tablets/Kindles; all the cars out there with OnStar or something similar; every truck or car with a wireless fleet tracker; every cargo container or physical asset that has a wireless location/anti-theft tracker; every FedEx driver who has a cellular-enabled signature capture reader; every utility meter or security camera with a cellular data link... the list goes on and on. "7.1 billion" is probably more like 1/2 people with phones and 1/2 "things" with cellular connections.
This list likely includes law enforcement trackers, military devices (devices that are not using MIL sats), and whatever the security agencies are using these days. Also, don't forget mifi devices, airplanes, and probably a ton of other crap that we just don't know about.
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I've seen articles claim there are more devices connected to cellular than people.
So that would mean it's less than half.
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That was my thought as well.
I'm personally "responsible" for a 500% skewing of the statistic.
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But who cares when you're trying to compare network sizes?
They're pointing out that they have the power to shut off or control a large number of devices. Imagine if the GSM LTE protocol was worked such that anything on the network had to be capable of showing an ad from one of the telco's choosings?
It might even work in their favor to be able to target someone repeatedly. It's not about how many eyeballs you get to it's how targeted can you make your ad to the eyeball it does get.
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You honestly think telcos don't know how many subscribers they have? Everybody I know from age 10 and up has one and personally I've got two phones, one for home and one for work. In my case it's because my employer's policy is very strict on mixing work related records with random apps that could compromise the phone. So does a friend of mine so he can hand the "work phone" to someone else when he's away, because that's the number many people call. It doesn't take many of us to add up to >100% of the po
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You honestly think telcos don't know how many subscribers they have?
I think they have strong incentives to inflate the number of subscribers they actually have to look good for their investors. One cell phone for every man, woman and child on the planet? Yeah, I'm a little dubious. There are a LOT of young people, poor people and old people who do not have cell phones.
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You honestly think telcos don't know how many subscribers they have? Everybody I know from age 10 and up has one and personally I've got two phones, one for home and one for work. In my case it's because my employer's policy is very strict on mixing work related records with random apps that could compromise the phone. So does a friend of mine so he can hand the "work phone" to someone else when he's away, because that's the number many people call. It doesn't take many of us to add up to >100% of the population.
I think telcos know how many subscribers they have -- I also think telcos don't know how many telcos there are globally. Among other things I think, I think this is likely the number of SIM cards produced to date, not active subscribers, and I think that people who work for telcos probably have a disproportionately large number of subscriptions.
I really have no problem with the stats on phone subscriptions, even though I'm pretty sure it's a projection that treats all parts of the world equal. However, th
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See this depends highly on where you live. No one in my extended family gives cell phones to kids until they can buy one themselves and my older relatives my parents age often don't have cell phones at all and the ones that do certainly don't own smart phones.
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I honestly think they don't know how many individual humans are their customers.
As has been pointed out by others, "subscriber" in telecom parlance refers to the device, not the person who owns it. Ergo, if you have a work phone, personal phone, and one of those wireless hotspot devices, you count as 3 subscribers.
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I honestly think they don't know how many individual humans are their customers.
As has been pointed out by others, "subscriber" in telecom parlance refers to the device, not the person who owns it. Ergo, if you have a work phone, personal phone, and one of those wireless hotspot devices, you count as 3 subscribers.
Add a car with 911 service and a Kindle and you are up to 5 pretty quickly.
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it is reasonable.
what you FAIL and maybe article writer fails in is quite simply that many people have many subs to their name.
and then there's all the non personal mobile phone subscriptions( remember this internet of things hype stuff?). you know, billboards, hand dryers etc which have sims and connect to the net.
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most of them(kiosk bought prepaids) have an activity time limit(topping it up extends it) and if you leave it to lapse they consider it deactivated(and can re-use the number).
Re:Sanity check (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't you mean to say.... a phony number?
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I have 3 mobile subscriptions and 0 TVs, si those numbers sound legit to me.
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Speaking of sanity check, more people have cell phones than access to clean toilets [unicef.org]. That, indeed, is crazy.
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But understandable. Building out and maintaining a wireless phone infrastructure is much easier and cheaper than doing so for a sewer system.
Call before you dig (Score:2)
All you need is a hole in the ground.
Good luck holding it while you call before you dig [wikipedia.org].
Re:Sanity check (Score:5, Informative)
MOBILE SUBCRIBERS END OF 2013
Total active mobile subscriptions or accounts -7.1B (was 6.7B in 2011, growth 6%)
Unique mobile users - 4.5 B (was 4.3B in 2011, growth 5%)
Actual mobile phones in use - 5.4 B (was 5.2B in 2011, growth 4%)
Not quite sure what that means... There are more active subscriptions than actual phones in use? Who is paying for a subscription without having a phone attached?
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The first thing that came to mind was someone with a device that uses only the data connection.
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In Europe, it's common for people who travel frequently abroad to have a sim for a local provider in each country they visit.
On some bits of the south coast of England, some people get better (or only) reception from France. They have a sim for France which they put in their phone when they're at home and a UK sim for when they're out to avoid accidental roaming charges when at home.
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Not quite sure what that means... There are more active subscriptions than actual phones in use? Who is paying for a subscription without having a phone attached?
In the developing world, it's very common for calling to be cheap in-network and expensive if you call someone on a different cellular provider.
The end result is everyone has two phones or dual sim phones.
Even triple and quad sim phones have been on the market for a while now.
It's not something that internationally known manufacturers were at all interested in,
but companies like Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Nokia have finally joined the Chinese in manufacturing them.
Common situation: Work phone + personal phone (Score:2)
Lots of people I know have at least two phones. Heck, I personally have a "work phone" and a "personal phone". My company is a lot less worried about their data mixing with other stuff, especially when combined with additional sandboxing mechanisms like GOOD. It helps me, too. If some organizational data gets out, my employer can erase the phone without me worrying that they'll erase my stuff. Also, I'm a lot freer to install apps than I would be if my company controlled what could be installed on the
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To be fair, the article itself does state that the 7.1B figure does not represent unique users or handsets in use. Instead, it says that "The number of unique users is now 4.5 Billion or 63% of all humans alive are actually users of mobile phones. The remaining 2.6 Billion accounts are second or third accounts for the same user... So 20% of us, one in five who has a mobile subscription or account, actually walks around with two phones (and at least two accounts)."
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It might actually be reasonable. There are a number of businesses out there that provide blackberries or other "work" cell phones. They could also be throwing in assorted iPads and other tablets, since they too probably have some 3g/4g plan associated with them. While I too doubt that it's 1 for 1, there are some areas where it might be 2 or 3 devices for one person. Who knows whether or not those folks make up for those ends of the world without cell towers.
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The number is reasonable. The reasoning behind it is prime grade A BS, though.
I'd be interested just how many of these subscriptions are not to a human but to a machine. Computers that call their admins when they lose power. Surveillance systems that alert police or owner. And in many instances there's more than one just as a failover necessity. I dare say those alone will dwarf the "human" subscribers.
And I'm pretty sure with a bit of thinking one can come up with many other subscriptions that "belong" to
Phones != unique users (Score:3)
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It's also why investors are kind dumb to keep expecting growth from mobiles. They are certainly in a state where it's far more realistic to expect them to maintain their position rather than grow especially with Android.
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We have 3 mobile phones in our house, and only 2 adults, though, if we didn't also have 2 kids, we might not feel the need for a "backup" phone.
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Stats skewed by Saul Goodman and Michael Westen.
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Ya, that is what I was thinking.
There is like 4 billion people in villages without power, let alone currency, in the world. They obviously do not have mobile phones.
Let alone babies, who since they cannot speak obviously do not own a mobile phone (I doubt that the ownership of mobile phones for the 1-12 demographic is very high at all) [and this is a very significant portion of the population].
I have no idea how many phones are currently activated, but I know the user base cannot be much over 50% of the cur
Re: Sanity check (Score:4, Insightful)
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Note that "active lines of service" is likely to be significantly more than the number of phones in regular use since in many countries it costs very little to keep an old phone active on payg.
Re:Sanity check (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually mobile phones are quite common in the developing world, where they represent a minimal investment in infrastructure and an enormous profit advantage to a canny user. Probably nowhere near 100%, but I think I heard a number around 1-in-3 or so recently, and that's among the poor agrarian communities.
As for cost - I've personally used a mobile phone for ~$8/month for years ($25 prepaid card, expires after 90 days), or $0.28/day - and that's a prepaid plan in the US, which probably makes it one of the most expensive plans in the world. Granted that doesn't allow for a lot of usage, but I don't talk on the phone recreationally so it works out fine.
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It's not that the numbers themselves are necessarily wrong, but they may not mean what the article implies.
Quoted for truth. My fear is that certain decision makers would use this figure as an excuse to remove even more pay phones from service.
What this means (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What this means (Score:5, Informative)
Public Relations is not marketing. Marketing deals with products; public relations deals with relation to customers and the public at large.
Marketing revolves around how to dress up Tide, how to convince the consumer they want Tide, what markets Tide aims at, what the advertising strategy is for Tide, and so on. These center around products, demographics, and how demographics connect to products.
Public relations instead revolves around Tide Co, how to convince the customer that Tide Co isn't an evil asshole company dumping sludge onto farmland in India, how much transparency Tide Co should have to keep customer trust, when Tide Co's ethics committee has come off its nut and is trying to create a PR nightmare by doing something that will reflect extremely negatively on Tide Co, etc. These center around the company, demographics, and the public at large.
The difference is subtle, but simple. Marketing tries to sell products. Public relations tries to make sure the company both actively creates rapport with the public (customers or not) and avoids offending the public. Good PR is about ethics and transparency; good marketing is about selling shit.
As an example: Apple has good PR. Their company is environmentally responsible, they're aware of their business operations, they communicate to the world at large through exciting and entertaining public appearances, and so on. Their marketing is less successful: more people bought Motorola, Samsung, and LG phones with Google software; who in the hell gets excited over Google and Samsung?
10 years ago, you needed an electronics communications strategy. It wasn't enough to market things on TV and in news papers; you needed to get customers on mailing lists, to tell them about what's happening in the company (not products, but exciting growth and customer outreach programs), and to give them exclusive insider deals or promotions or whatever. You couldn't just put "iPhone, SALE $299 REG $399" in the paper; you had to make the customer a part of your communications network, make them feel like you're talking specifically to them. Now it's mobile apps.
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... You just spent all that text trying to convince me that the same thing was two different things.
Its not a subtle difference, its a marketing plow used to justify peoples existence. PR IS marketing, like it or not.
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Logistics sounds like a function of project management. Pricing, brand, market strategy, these seem like marketing.
The whole of the public face is one big umbrella; but calling a PR guy a Marketing guy seems ridiculous. PR people are not the same as the Marketing people trying to sell you shit. There's always been a firm divide.
I guess we have marketing the products and marketing the company, so it's about the same.
thank you for sharing (Score:2)
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Ass kissing lip service where you're actually blowing people off isn't PR either, well I guess you can consider it bad PR as all you're doing is demonstrating that you don't actually give a shit. People aren't as stupid as you think.
God you must really suck at your job.
They can go to 110% and beyond (Score:2)
There are obviously huge numbers of poor and destitute that have no access to luxuries like mobile phones. Wealthier people are walking around with multiple mobile subscriptions. Either by work/personal accounts, or accounts for tablets and modems, or whatever. So I wonder how far past 100% they will be able to go? 150%? 200 even? It's a good time to be Samsung. Also hard to believe that HTC and Nokia are in so much trouble. Even a small part of 7 billion is a lot of business.
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this dial goes up to 11
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In TFA, they claim 4.5 billion unique users, and that this number has only gone up by 5% since 2011.
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There are obviously huge numbers of poor and destitute that have no access to luxuries like mobile phones. Wealthier people are walking around with multiple mobile subscriptions. Either by work/personal accounts, or accounts for tablets and modems, or whatever. So I wonder how far past 100% they will be able to go? 150%? 200 even? It's a good time to be Samsung. Also hard to believe that HTC and Nokia are in so much trouble. Even a small part of 7 billion is a lot of business.
Interestingly enough, mobile phones aren't the luxury in the developing world we might think them to be, considering that more people have phones than have electricity*. They're used to replace obvious things, like wired communications, and less obvious services, like banking.
*WTF, right? How do you charge your phone? [chargeall.com]
Re:They can go to 110% and beyond (Score:4, Informative)
The return of pay phones (Score:2)
people will buy a phone and account, and then hire people in shifts to stand on the street corner shouting out that they've got a phone. They then let people make calls for a markup.
Is there something that keeps people from just installing a pay phone that connects to the cell network?
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Actually, the poor and destitut
US cell carriers' billing structure (Score:2)
It's more of a quirk that in North America, we're quite reluctant to carry more than one phone. Everyone else I've seen has no problem with 2 or more phones at the same time.
I wonder how much of this quirk arises from the incumbent carriers' established billing practices, such as a $35 per month minimum charge to keep service on an Android phone (source: virginmobileusa.com). Want cellular voice and only Wi-Fi data? Too bad [slashdot.org].
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Ironically (not really but let's use that word) phones with multiple sim card slots are popular in 3td world countries. They're talking about active sim cards, not phones.
Sat and cell usage caps are harsher (Score:2)
Now - will mobile data allow a way to skip over the cable-internet providers and offer real competition?
Not until mobile drastically increases its capacity. Currently Xfinity (home Internet and TV service by Comcast) has a cap on the order of 300 GB per month [comcast.com], compared to about 10 GB per month for comparably priced satellite [exede.com] or cellular [verizonwireless.com] data plans.
Just waiting... (Score:2)
For the US Supreme Court to decide that each individually US activated device is a person AND can contribute to campaign finance.
So? (Score:2)
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I'm actually surprised you don't see more cell phones that allow for 2+ lines/sim cards.
Cost per active line (Score:2)
Tomi Ahonen confirms it...Apple is dying (Score:3)
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Apple's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Apple faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Apple because Apple is dying. Things are looking very bad for Apple. As many of us are already aware, Apple continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Now where have I heard something like this before?
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Yeah, but it's not like they can re-hire Steve Jobs to save them this time.
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Android is taking over but taking over what? The Yugos & Fiats of the phone world. And Android is, well, fragmented into a huge number of pieces and continuing to fragment & suffer a huge amount of malware-security & upgradability issues. The question is who will take over Android and turn it into a long term stable, safe platform is it Tizen?
Articles like this are sensationalism, pure and simple.
Apple knows that in the end hardware & the OS is only part of the "mobile phone industry".
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It's hilarious for those of us who suffered through the Apple of the late 90's to read this regurgitation of talking points... well, hilarious for those of us that use Android. Two to five more years and Apple will be hitting lows like they did in
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Apple and it's users said the same thing when they were getting their ass handed to them in the PC market. Microsoft is the low end crap. It's fragmented over tons of hardware. It has security issues. Apple has a vertical structure that will win in the end. It's hilarious for those of us who suffered through the Apple of the late 90's to read this regurgitation of talking points...
Dude, your comment reads like it's from the late '90s. Since then, Microsoft has been largely stagnant, their tablet and phone offerings largely a failure, the "inevitable" Windows monopoly doesn't look so inevitable any more, and OS X's share has grown. Macbooks are a very large percent of laptop sales, even to enterprise, and if you count tablets as computers, Apple's worldwide market share is about 19.5%, bigger than HP and Dell combined [appleinsider.com]. Not to mention Apple getting the lion's share of profits.
So it loo
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Android outsells iOS devices for quite some time (years?) now yet this means nothing to Apple, because a) Apple is not in the business of selling an iPhone to everyone and their dog, they're in the business of selling high-end, highly profitable devices to people who can afford them, and b) browser data shows actual internet usage numbers favour Apple at a ratio of 2:1 versus Android, so either Andriod users are too stupid to use their devices, or Android is too complicated/doesn't work, or they just get th
Bad assumptions... (Score:3)
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In addition, "mobile subscriber" does not automatically equal a cell phone - you also have cellular enabled tablets, personal hotspot devices, portable cellular units for use with regular, analog telephones, etc. I have a good couple dozen of those in a closet, active and ready for deployment.
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Your assumption is bad. Ftfa, they took numbers on smart separately. The summary does not make a distinction. So you are objecting to a nonexistent slight.
The industry sold 1.8 Billion new mobile
phones just last year alone. And more than half of the new
sales are now smartphones (990 million were in 2013). In
the installed base, already 31% of all mobile phones in use
are smartphones (1.7 Billion units) and this year will sell
about 1.2 Billion more with roughly half going to replace
older smartphones and half
misleading (Score:2)
about half the world's population has at least one mobile device. about half have zero mobile devices. Of course, you see shithead-targeting stats like "six billion people have access to a mobile device", which means exactly nothing.
How many are actually in use? (Score:2)
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A -lot- of people have several devices, probably enough to make up that number. Also, its accounts activated, not active accounts. Big difference. All the people who switch phones every 6 months inflate the numbers a lot.
But don't underestimate the amount of people who have multiple active phones, be it because they have a work black berry, or because they're tools that need the latest iphone and the latest galaxy Swhatever...at the same time....
Too Many Comments from the Basement (Score:2)
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Agreed. You can lead /.ers to TFA but ya can't make 'em read it.
Also, everyone has 2.4 legs and owns a hyena. (Score:2)
Averages are funny like that.
Devices NOT users (Score:2)
From the summary:
Sure. We are now at 2 Billion TV sets in use globally. But mobile has 3.5 times users.
It is clear that they are confusing devices with users. TV sets can have multiple users per device, users can have multiple mobile devices a piece. Its an interesting bit of trivia that there are as many mobile devices as people, but to make too many conclusions from this is a mistake.
Proportions lesson (Score:2)
Apple is not "declining". They are growing. (They also make most of the profit.) Android is growing fast, Apple is growing fast. Both statements can be true at the same time. Both can win. This is not a zero-sum game. Your opponent doesn't have to die so that you can live.
OP3 - OPPP - One Phone Per Person (Score:2)
From this point on we just need to work on evening the distribution.
This is pretty stupid (Score:2)
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Total adoption is hard to dertermine. Is a phone bought 3 years ago still used? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's only used as a remote control for the TV while the same person has a new phone. Does that count? Hard to say.
It's not hard to say at all - they're talking about active cellular subscriptions, i.e. active sim cards.
Does that 3 year old phone still have an active sim? Then it counts as a subscriber; if not, it doesn't.
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Some people have more than one SIM. Others use the same SIM in more than one device.
My point is that "how many SIMs are active right now" is the metric telcos use to determine the number of subscribers. If the SIM isn't active (i.e., installed in a device and transmitting info), it's not considered a subscriber.
Also, a smartphone can still can be usefull without a SIM card.
Totally - I put Torque Pro and Track Recorder on my old Droid X, which now lives a new life as my dashcam.
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It sounds like it is an indication of what the dominant platform is going to be at some point in the future. If 80% of new sales are Android devices, and 15% are iOS devices, then that sounds like the installed base for Android is going to eclipse iOS in the next year or so. If Apple continues to release new phones regularly that fit a demand then that will swing back the other way.
Putting up with Android problems (Score:2)
Some people use Android because they do care about technology and because they don't want to put up with problems inherent in iOS [pineight.com], like these:
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Wouldn't the winner of the "platform wars" be determined by which platform has better total adoption, not by new sales?
You've recognized the difference between installed base and market share. Market share predicts how the installed base will move in the near future as devices are replaced. But even installed base doesn't tell the whole story. There's a perception that owners of devices running iOS are likely to spend far more money per person on mobile web sites and mobile apps than owners of devices running Android.
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