Nearly a Billion Smart Devices Last Year, 2 Billion By 2016
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012The International Data Corporation out of Framingham, Massachusetts just released information on smart connected devices for last year along with predicted growth patterns for them through to 2016 (four years). ‘Smart connected’ means any device capable of running applications and of connecting to the Internet. This includes smart phones, tablets, and other portable computing items.
In 2011, says IDC, more than 916 million units were shipped, making for about $489 billion in sales for the year. These numbers are derived from three other IDC quarterly surveys conducted, including the Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, Mobile Phone Tracker, and Media Tablet Tracker.
With those strong numbers, IDC expects unit shipments to continue growing, topping 1.1 billion next year and hitting 1.84 billion units – nearly two billion – by 2016. That’s double 2011′s numbers. That’s a lot of smart phones, folks.
Interestingly, IDC can extrapolate growth rates for individual device types, giving numbers for how fast Apple, Android, and Windows will grow in these genres.