A whopping 418.6 million cell phones were shipped worldwide in the 1st quarter of this year. For the first time ever, half of those phones were smartphones, most of them running the Android mobile operating system. Just 37.4 million of those phones were iPhones. CNet has the story:
It seemed inevitable, and now it has happened: for the first time ever, feature phones have taken a backseat to smartphones in terms of quantities shipped.
In the first quarter of 2013, device makers shipped 216.2 million smartphones worldwide, a volume that accounted for 51.6 percent of total global shipments and that marked the first time smartphones have claimed more than half of all quarterly shipments, according to market researcher IDC.
The smartphone market grew 41.6 percent compared with the first quarter of 2012, but declined 5.1 percent from the shipment tally for the fourth quarter of 2012. The first quarter of the year typically sees a slowdown, especially in comparison with the holiday-shopping-filled fourth quarter.
The first quarter saw a total of 418.6 million mobile phones — both smartphones and the less-powerful feature phones — shipped worldwide, IDC said Thursday.
And today we celebrate...