Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

I’ll Take One Smartphone and Two Dumb Ones: High-End Handsets Grab More Marketshare

From the “that makes sense” file: Smartphones like the iPhone and Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry now account for almost one in three phones sold in the U.S.

That bit of data comes from a new NPD Group report, which says that smartphones market share reached 28 percent in Q2 of 2009, up 47 percent over the last year.

Which isn’t a shock, since the phones continue to get better and cheaper–remember when Apple’s (AAPL) first iPhone cost $600, all the way back in 2007? And all sorts of players, from mom-and-pop software developers to manufacturers like Palm, (PALM) have bet their business on the notion that one day not that far from now, nearly every phone will be a smartphone.

But in the meantime, “feature phones,” the plain vanilla handsets that you almost never read about on this site or any other tech-focused publication, continue to dominate the market, which continues to expand. NPD says sales volume increased 18 percent, revenue increased 18 percent, and the average sales price for new phones increased four percent, to $87 a pop.

[Image credit: cod_gabriel]

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik