Cheaper devices getting smarter

Phones look like they’re getting cleverer: one in three mobiles will be a smartphone by 2013, according to ABI Research, up from one in ten today. Nokia remains the most popular smartphone seller, with 52 percent of the market, while Symbian is found on 65 percent of devices.

The expected growth in smartphone numbers is “a product of a number of complex factors including carriers’ drives to grow data revenues from advanced services and the general trend to pushing ‘smart” operating systems down into middle tier devices,” the company says.

What’s really exciting about this is not that there are more smartphones out there but that more and more mid-range devices can now be classed as smartphones – good news for operators, as users are likely to consume more data, and good news for users, as they can get access to more and better content.