Nielsen has released its mobile data for the third quarter of 2011, which shows that among American mobile subscribers, smartphone penetration has reached a proportion of 44 percent.
It is believed that this significant jump in the market share has been spurred by the adoption of the devices by individuals between the ages of 18 and 34 years. This statistic is over double the figure from two years ago, when penetration had reached only 18 percent, and it aligns well with the predictions that Nielsen had made when it said that by the close of 2011, half of the mobile users in the United States will own smartphones.
It should be noted that estimates from some other organizations have indicated a notably lower smartphone penetration in the U.S., such as comScore’s data that showed that as of the end of October, it had reached only 38.5 percent.
Companies are closely monitoring the penetration of smartphones as these devices are seen as a jumping off point for the growth of mobile media and marketing, as well as for the widening m-commerce channels. In that light, the Nielsen report indicates that the portion of smartphone users that download apps and that access the mobile web by 49 percent and 57 percent in the third quarter of 2011.
Highly popular games such as “Fruit Ninja” and “Angry Birds” have cause the number of people who play games on their smartphones to grow significantly over the last year. In fact, the number of people who have downloaded games has increased by 83 percent, boosting the share of smartphone owners who have performed this activity to 35 percent. Equally, the number of people who have played online games on a smartphones has increased to 16 percent – a figure that is nearly double that of last year.
