Smartphone and tablet market penetration is going faster than Connected TVs. In Q4 2011, global smartphone shipments jumped to 157 million units9.
It was a rise of 56% from last year beating the annual growth rate.
Growth continues but it is slowing down as most of the developed markets come close to 80-90% penetration. Meanwhile, global tablet shipments reached 17 million units in Q3 201110.
As tablets and smartphones get faster, allowing a quicker transfer of data, integrating new connectivity and interactivity paradigms along with fancy graphics, users have developed a habit for downloading applications.
This pushes mobile application market to a rapid evolution shifting the business landscape and to a competitive environment.
The research firm Gartner recently forecast that mobile application stores will deliver 17.7 billion downloads internationally in 201111.
A key difference of each platform is the application market, App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace.