Smartphone Penetration Approaching Tipping Point As PC Usage Declines

Smartphone penetration is slowly approaching the tipping point where it will be more common to have a smartphone than a feature phone among the general population.

Ofcom says the UK and Japan are among the countries leading the way to that milestone as consumers turn away from PC usage—a trend with wider implications for the digital content market as a whole. Some 46 percent of consumers in the UK are using smartphones, giving it the highest smartphone penetration in Europe, with Spain in second position at 45 percent. Japan, meanwhile, can boast that some 93 percent of its consumers are using devices with 3G connections across smartphones and high-end featurephones (that figure is only 48 percent in the UK, since some feature phones will have 3G access but many do not). Given that mobile penetration in the UK is now 130 percent (some people have more than one device), it effectively means that nearly half the population is using a smartphone now.