Smartphone sales soar in 2009

While Nokia shipped the most smartphones - a whopping 67.7 million devices - and held 39% of the market, RIM's 34.5 million smartphone shipments gave it a 20% market share in 2009. Apple held its own at third place with 14% of the market, followed closely by HTC and Samsung.

The factors that are driving the increased smartphone sales seem to be lowered prices and new smartphone launches. Ramon Llamas, an analyst at IDC, said slashed prices have "helped to create a perfect set of conditions to push shipments to a record level." The emergence of Google's Android and the Palm WebOS operating systems had a big impact on 2009 smartphone sales by offering users more functionality.

For all of 2009, sellers shipped 174 million smartphone, up 15% from the 151 million in 2008. Smartphones also accounted for an increasingly large portion of all mobile phones shipped in 2009.

Demand for smartphones on the rise

IDC expects that increased demand for smartphones will lead to new shipment records in 2010, especially with Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems upgrades expected. Rising smartphone sales highlight the importance of developing content for mobiles.

One key aspect to keep in mind though is that IDC's definition of a "converged mobile device" or simply, a smartphone, is quite broad. For IDC, any mobile phone that combines voice communications capabilities with pen or keypad handheld data features is tracked within this category. Increased shipments of all smartphones do not necessarily mean that 179 million smartphones with internet access were shipped in 2009.

Nevertheless, smartphone demand is on the rise, and it is increasing at such a rate that Gartner Inc., a company that specializes in technology research, predicts mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide by 2013, the RJI blog explains. In fact, over 3 billion of the world's adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology by 2014, according to Gartner's predictions. Additional developments in mobile payment, commerce, and banking will provide a better infrastructure for online transactions too.

More smartphones, more mobile news content

The projections for the next couple of years signal the rising importance of investing in mobile content and print publishers are taking notice. A survey released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) last September, found that publishers are focusing on developing smartphone mobile applications as a way to expand their brands and gain revenue. More than 80% of newspaper and magazine respondents answered that people will rely more heavily on mobile devices as a primary source of information over the next three years.

One way newspapers can and have capitalized on the ubiquity of smartphones is by providing applications for the iPhone, and both free and paid-for apps developed by major newspapers have met much success. In France, the free iPhone apps for Libération and Le Figaro have been downloaded 400,000 and 600,000 times respectively. In December, Britain's Guardian released a paid-for iPhone app with a £2.39 price tag and by January, it had been downloaded almost 69,00 times. At that rate, income from the app alone could reach almost £2 million a year. Other newspapers are jumping on the iPhone app bandwagon, promising to deliver more news content to iPhones this year. These figures signal the importance of mobile content and the willingness of users to pay for content delivered to their mobiles.

Although some may question the ability of paywalls to monetize newspapers because users seem reluctant to pay for content delivered to their PCs, the rising importance of mobile content, and most importantly, users' willingness to pay money for content delivered to it, presents a key opportunity to monetize newspapers and increase revenue. And as the number of people who own mobiles that can receive this kind of content grows, the newspapers' opportunity to capitalize on mobile grows too.