Smartphones have truly become a big part of our lives. It’s hard to believe that just 10 years ago we had little brick style phones with a 320×240 display and allowed you to do an amazing number of tasks such as make a phone call, play snake, or store phone numbers. With platforms such as iOS and Android leading the way and innovating on many fronts, we’re now blessed with amazing technology that can do just about everything besides get us dressed and make us breakfast.
According to Technology Review, smartphones and tablets are on track to saturate US markets and the developing World in record time. Many would say they already have with the wide choice of Android devices on the market. For example, from the time of availability to 10% penetration, the telephone took 25 years and electricity took 30 years. Television took a little over 5 years, smartphones took around 8 years, while tablets have only taken around 3 years.
Here’s the interesting part. From 10% penetration to 40% penetration, smartphones have only taken around 3 years. That’s a huge increase in a very short period of time. Compare that to the Internet which took 5 years to make that same jump, one of the fastest growing technologies we’ve gotten to know, and you’ve got a big contender.
Those technologies with “last mile” problems—bringing electricity cables or telephone wire to individual homes—appear to spread more slowly. It took almost a century for landline phones to reach saturation, or the point at which new demand falls off. Mobile phones, by contrast, achieved saturation in just 20 years. Smart phones are on track to halve that rate yet again, and tablets could move still faster, setting consecutive records for speed to market saturation in the United States.
We live in a World where it’s important to always be connected and thanks to previous technology, electricity, telephones, and the Internet, it has paved the way for these newer devices that we’ve grown to love and cherish. Tablet and smartphone sales are only going to go up. They are literally the television of our generation, the radio of the 1920’s through 1950’s.