Smartphones Still Shine Amid Declines in Handset Sales

Smartphone sales once again provided a glimmer of hope in an otherwise grim report of handset sales conducted by the United Kingdom-based arm of research firm Gartner.

Sales of smartphones worldwide grew almost 13 percent to 36 million units despite the largest sequential contraction in overall handset sales since the firm began tracking them in 2001. Worldwide handset sales plummeted 14.5 percent from last quarter, bottoming out at 269 million units. The company reiterated its view that sales to consumers will decrease by about 4 percent in 2009 compared with 2008.

The research firm attributed touchscreen technology to the popularity of smartphones.

“Much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in mid-tier and high-end devices,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, in a report. “‘Touch for the sake of touch’ was enough of a driver in the mid-tier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market.”

Together with the conclusions of a recent report from Forrester research, it appears that smartphones are not only resilient to otherwise slumping demand but are reaching ubiquity. Forrester suggests that the hardware features attributed to smartphones are becoming so commonplace that the market will soon transition to a world “where we just have intelligent phones, not ‘voice phones,’ ‘smartphones’ and ‘feature phones.’”