Lets start with comparisons. Newspapers? the total circulation of all daily newspapers worldwide is about 480 milllion. Cars? There are about 800 million cars on the planet. Cable and satellite TV subscriptions? About 850 million. Personal computers including desktops, laptops and netbooks, about 1 billion.
Fixed landline telephone connections, about 1.2 billion. eMail users about 1.3 billion. Internet users about 1.4 billion. Television sets about 1.5 billion. And credit cards? About 1.7 billion people carry at least one credit card in their wallet. But there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions now in January 2009. More than twice the number of credit card owners, 2.5 times the number of TV sets or internet uses, approx 3 times the number of email users of total landline phones and yes, four times the number of personal computers.
This is a monster sized industry, totally towering over all others.
Bigger than TV, bigger than the internet: Understand mobile of 4 billion users
If these number hold up (and I’m no expert) then this is an incredible introduction to the growth and untapped potential of the mobile market.
From a personal perspective, although I have had WAP and ‘internet capable’ mobile phones for several years, its only been with the iPhone that I have used my mobile device for anything other than voice, SMS and occasional MMS purposes.
This was due to two factors. The miserable browsing and text entry capabilites of mobile devices and even more than that, the prohibitive cost of accessing data packages.
The iPhone, and now others, blew these two out of the water, hence I now read most of my emails and skim RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter on my iPhone, bookmarking articles and items that I may wish to read when at a desktop MAC/PC.
