Did a billion smartphones really ship last year?

USA: No! Sure 1.6 billion cellphones shipped last year, but only about half (840) million of them were actually "smartphones."

Another market research firm once told me that if you want to sell a lot of market studies, you have to report big numbers, and some of our competitors have done so.

Most other analysts lump the 2G voice-centric budget, 2G and 3G midrange and 3G feature phones into one category they call "feature phones". Those analysts assume that all of the "so-called "feature phone segment" is being rapidly displaced by smartphones, which is not true. Here's where the 840 million smartphones shipped last year and where the other 802 million "non-smartphones" shipped.

The author is president and principal analyst, Forward Concepts