Analyst firm IDC has published its latest smartphone predictions, claiming that manufacturers will ship 472 million of them in 2011 – up 55% on last year’s 305 million. IDC expects this to continue to grow too, up to 982 million smartphone shipments in 2015. “The smartphone floodgates are open wide,” says senior research analyst Kevin Restivo. “Mobile phone users around the world are turning in their ‘talk-and-text’ devices for smartphones as these devices allow users to perform daily tasks like shopping and banking from anywhere.” IDC reckons that 38.9% of smartphones shipped this year will be Android phones, followed by Symbian (18.2%), iPhone (18.2%), BlackBerry (14.2%) and Windows Phone (3.8%). However, by 2015, it thinks the order will be Android (43.8%), Windows Phone (20.3%), iPhone (16.9%) and BlackBerry (13.4%) – yet another analyst who thinks Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia will mean big growth for Windows Phone.
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…