IDC: Smartphones will eventually surpass feature phone shipments in 2013

The mobile industry is on the verge of a major turning point, according to a new report from the International Data Corporation.

See also: Canalys forecasts one billion Android smartphone sales in 2017 and rapid growth for Windows Phone

Market intelligence company reported on Tuesday that global smartphone shipments are expected to reach approximately 958.8 million units.

It is a 32.7 percent increase from 722.5 million units in 2012.

More important, IDC analyst predicted that this will be the year that smartphones surpass feature phones in total cell phone shipments all over the world.

Specifically, analysts expect that smartphones will account for 52.2 percent of all mobile phone shipments by the end of 2013.

Ramon Llamas, a research manager at IDC mobile devices team, stressed the importance of this shift in the report goes so far as to describe 2013 as a "watershed year for smartphones."

If you look at the number of vendors that support both feature phones and smartphones, many of them have not only successfully transferred their product portfolios to select smartphones, but smartphones have become their primary value proposition going forward. In some cases, smartphones accounted for over 50% of their quarterly shipment volume. Going forward, we expect that the gap between smartphones and feature phones to grow ever wider.

IDC's report on Tuesday is similar with another published by IHS iSuppli last november. The forecast use NAND Flash memory concerned in particular, signaling a major SHIFT that will directly affect the supply chain partners as soon as this year.

However, Nielsen issued an industry survey in January 2013, positing that smartphones still have "room to grow" in several top emerging markets at least.

As for six months ago found Nielsen to feature phones, which researchers defined as "devices without touch screen, QWERTY keyboard and operating system" is far more dominant in India and Russia, covering 80 per cent and 51 per cent of mobile users, respectively.

Chart via IDC

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Google's app store downloads could surpass Apple's June

Summary: Major Android user base will help Google Play likely to unseat the App Store as the largest source of mobile app downloads in the world.

900 Million Army of Android devices that have been enabled to date is likely to push Google Play in pole position among mobile app stores in June.

Google and Apple in may recently announced almost in unison they had reached important milestones for downloads from their respective stores.

Google announced in may it had reached 48 billion downloads on the back of a month which saw the Android users download about 1.5 billion apps. Google had about 700,000 apps available in June, according to the App brain.

The day before, Apple announced iOS owners since opening its App Store in 2008, had downloaded 50 billions of apps – excluding re-downloads and updates – and did so at a rate of two billion apps per month. Apple has about 850,000 iPhone apps and 350,000 iPad apps available.

Horace Dediu, Asymco, mobile analyst at researcher forecasts that Google's play downloads are likely to be on par with App Store downloads at the end of May.

Given two store's prices, Dediu told ZDNet it was "very likely" that Google Play downloads will surpass the App Store in June.

However, it is the large number of Android devices that will drive Google Play in the lead, since iOS owners tend to install more apps than Android owners per unit.

According to Dediu, there are 83 apps per iOS device while there are 53 apps every Android device activation. He added that the gap between the two companies on this metric showed no sign of narrowing.

Liam Tung is an Australian business technologies for many Swedish journalist living a few miles north of Stockholm for its flavor. He received a Bachelor's degree in economics and art (cultural studies) at Sydney's Macquarie University, but hack (no Nordic or malware for that matter) their way into a career as an enterprise tech, security and telecommunications journalist with ZDNet Australia. These days Liam is a full-time freelance technology journalist who writes for various Australian publications, including Sydney Morning Herald online. He is primarily interested in how technology affects the way businesses and people communicate, trade and consume.