Smartphones outsell feature phones (again) for the first time, worldwide

It’s not your imagination—most people you know, worldwide, have (or are about to get) a smartphone. According to new mobile industry data, 435 million mobile phones were sold around the world in the second quarter of 2013 alone, and just over half of those were smartphones.

“Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement on Wednesday.

However, IDC (a rival industry analysis firm) said this shift already took place during the first quarter of 2013.

Where are the highest regions of smartphone growth? Asia, Latin America, and parts of Eastern Europe.

Samsung remains the top-selling phone manufacturer globally, with 31.7 market share during that same period. Meanwhile, Windows Phone took advantage of BlackBerry—zooming ahead of BlackBerry to the number three spot (after Android and iOS) for operating system market share, reaching 3.3 percent to BlackBerry’s 2.6 percent.

According to new related data from independent analyst Chetan Sharma, there has been modest growth in the American mobile market. As we’ve reported before, the United States is fairly saturated when it comes to phones already.

In the second quarter of 2013, there were only 139,000 new connections, a drop of 95 percent when compared to the second quarter of 2012. This marks the lowest number of new connections in US mobile industry history. That said, there are still many Americans who don’t have smartphones.

“Smartphones are now past the 60 percent mark in the US and continue to sell at a brisk pace, accounting for almost 87 percent of the devices sold in Q2 2013,” Sharma wrote. “Apple led the smartphone sales amongst the top 4 operators with 42 percent share for the quarter. While the US penetration of smartphones is 60 percent, the 60 percent of the [subscription] base is concentrated in only 35 percent of the households, thus leaving plenty of growth in the marketplace.”