Titbit: 1 Billion Smartphones by 2015

I am just listening to the latest Windows Weekly videocast on TWiT and they are talking about recent market forecasts released by IDC and also by the Gartner Group in relation to smartphones. Paul Thurrott (that’s Paul in the screen capture of TWiT Windows Weekly at right) was giving numbers from the Gartner forecasts.

Gartner are forecasting that by 2015 the top 3 smartphones will be:

1. Android phones with annual sales of 540 million.
2. Microsoft’s Phone 7 with annual sales of 216 million.
3. Apples iOS iPhone with annual sales of 190 million.

The almost unbelievable thing about these numbers is not:

• (a) that Microsoft’s Phone 7 will end up in the number two position, or
• (b) that Apple, who are currently on top (in smartphones), will fall to third.

No. The unbelievable thing is that by 2015 there will be close to 1 billion smartphones being sold annually. That is 1,000,000,000 mobile phone (cell phone) smartphones sold in the one year!

No wonder Google and Microsoft (and Nokia) are fighting hard to get into the game. Based on these numbers there is more money to be made in mobile phone sales than almost any other retail business on the planet.

As a comparison, the number of computers sold worldwide last year, which was the best year ever for PC sales, was around 330,000,000. This is expected to be the peak year for PCs sales. The forecast for 2011 is 20 percent down at around 265,000,000.

The smartphone forecast for 2015 is three times this peak number for PC sales!!