"We are in the multi-device age," commented Bob O'Donnell, vice president of Clients and Displays at IDC, "and we believe the number of people who use multiple devices will only continue to increase. The trick, moving forward, will be to integrate all these devices into a unified whole through use of personal cloud-type applications and services. That's the real challenge of what we have often called the 'PC Plus' era."
The growth of Android-based smartphones is linked to several factors; most importantly the price of the devices, also the growth of smartphone sales in China with its 3G network subsidies. It is suggested in many instances the smartphone will be the user's primary Internet device.
This year the number of mobile phones in the world is predicted to exceed the number of people. There is an interesting chart, you can sort by clicking the headings, of mobile phone ownership around the world, thanks to Wikipedia. For the people of China to catch up with the mobile phone ownership rate of people in the UAE would require the sales of 1,654,190,000 new mobiles today!
Androids celebrating the news yesterday
Where are Apple devices in this prediction? IDC predicts Apple iOS devices growing from their current 14.6 per cent share to 17.3 per cent in 2016.
In summary, the predicted devices shipped figures for 2016 are these; Android 31.1 per cent, Windows x86 25.1 per cent, Apple iOS 17.3 per cent and other smart connected devices 26.5 per cent. Personally I would guesstimate a low teens percentage of the other devices could be Windows on ARM devices. WoA seems to have been passed over in the IDC analysis.
