Mobile industry analyst Horace Dediu is impatient with analysts dropping phrases like ‘everybody has got a smartphone’ – something we’ve seen said at numerous tech conferences too. It’s not true, even in the US, where smartphone adoption has rocketed in recent years. Dediu has a good blog post digging into that growth, while warning that 41% of US mobile users are still on feature phones. That’s changing at a rare old clip, though: “2.5 million more people first started using smartphones in the three month period ending May vs. the three month period ending in April,” he explains. Over the last 41 months, on average 572k Americans a week buy their first smartphone, and that rate isn’t slowing down yet – the latest weekly figure is 583k switchers. “To summarize, with penetration now at about 60% in the US, the rate of adoption of smartphones is not slowing in any perceptible way,” he writes. “So not only is there no saturation, but there is no slowing of adoption of smartphones in the US, the most penetrated large market. Globally, the penetration of smartphones is less than half of that in the US. About 4 billion people are about to switch.”
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