The #smartphone myth?

Gartner has reported that Smartphone sales continue to rocket (Total Telecom+ Sept 2011) with a rise of 74% year-on-year, and this clearly adds credence to the assertion of SK Telecom that free smartphone apps may place a threat to IMS based services offered by mobile carriers - see Roy Rubenstein's article "Multi tasking"

However SMS Marketing company Tatango have put out the fancy infographic shown here

showing that the main use of such devices continues to be text messaging and photographs.

You may well argue that it's a tremendous success that social networking, gaming, and downloading apps have all been listed as uses of smartphones by consumers, but it will be interesting to see how things pan-out as operators move away from diets of all you can eat bandwidth.

It will be interesting to hear from people like Alex Musil of Shazam and Marc Anné (VP Customer Insight & Advocacy) of Orange Business Services at Total Telecom World as they talk about some of the issues surrounding this subject as well as Olivier Baujard – CTO – Deutsche Telekom Group whose keynote presentation is entitled The Smartphone Challenge