The latest buzz on the gizmo gadget scene is that Smartphone usage is set to increase dramatically with the sales volume forecasted to rise from 174 million in 2009 to 500 million in 2014 with a CAGR of 16.28%.
News is also dominated by headlines like :
- Smartphone sales jumped by 34 per cent in third quarter of 2010: IDC India
- "Overall, Indian smartphone sales are expected to touch 5.96 million units by end of 2010," says Naveen Mishra, lead analyst, Mobile Handsets Research, IDC India.
- "The propensity to adopt feature phones and smartphones is greatest amongst the youth and business executive segments, whose purchase decisions are often driven by peer group influence and workplace usage patterns, as well as larger disposable incomes and willingness to experiment with new technology platforms," Anirban Banerjee, associate vice-president, research, IDC India mentions in an official communiqué.
The phones are being used more like laptops . The desktops were discarded for laptops and now smartphones are being seen replacing the laptops in increasing numbers.
With more and more Apps. Being available for smartphones the ease with which you email, communicate, connect to social media sites, play games or even surf websites on these phones is making people use the phone more than their laptops.
According to John Shen, the Lab Director at Nokia Research Center, the smartphone of 2015 will go even further: You will be able to link phones together to form a cluster where a group of phones provides PC-like processing capability.
In short the web is becoming more and more mobile . This is backed by the statements made by the people in the online industry during this season on online sales:
- Daily online sales exceeded $1 billion on six days this season, which was twice as many days as a year ago, said Michael McNamara, a vice president at SpendingPulse. The growth meant online sales grabbed a larger share of the season’s total sales, he said.
- “Today eCommerce accounts for a much larger share of overall retail sales compared to a few years ago. And during this holiday season, it registered double digit growth for 6 out of 7 weeks,” Michael McNamara, vice president of MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, said in a news release.
The main point to be noted is that the chidren of today get their first phone by the age of thirteen and are also used to the mode of cashless payments.
Hence it is very important to note that the teens and twentys of tomorrow will be more accustomed to online buying, if your store is online and has a wide presence on the web then your business has a future else there is a full possibility that you lose the online market share to your competitor who might have gone online and mobile before you.
The web removes the geographic boundaries and offers you the option to target the local and the global markets depending on your online strategies.
As the smart phones become smarter we also have to become smarter to adopt the revolutionary and evolutionary changes and learn how to balance our virtual and real lives at the same time benefitting from the benefits of the online world .
