Holiday Season Yields Smartphone Bang

Written by Claire Thursday, 05 January 2012 15:46

Those of us that have smartphones have grown so reliant on them that it's hard to imagine that anyone gets by without one. I know I temporarily had to revert to a flip phone over the summer, and more than once found myself en route to my destination before realizing that without my droid I didn't have any directions.

And over 20 million people have joined in on that reliance in the past couple weeks.

On Christmas Day alone there were 6.8 million new iOS and Android devices activated, in addition to 242 million app downloads. The stats we saw for this previous Christmas day showed 140% growth from Christmas in 2010. These numbers only solidify the predictions of how mobile will grow in the coming years.

Microsoft Tag recently released an infographic highlighting statistics of mobile today and its future. One of the interesting stats is that by 2014 mobile web browsing is set to surpass desktop browsing. Currently 91% of mobile internet time is spent socially – if that percentage holds strong, the social networking sites we all know so well will have a strong future in the coming years. So really the lesson we all need to learn here is that a successful business will need two things: mobile-optimized access and social ties.