EMERGING ECONOMIES AND low-end markets are ripe for growth in smart-phones, and Symbian and Android are the platforms best positioned to harvest it. That's the view of ABI Research, which projects that sales of smartphones could double from about 200 million this year to 400 million in 2014. "The high-end handsets are creating the buzz, but how fast these things can move downstream will determine the next big bump in growth," Kevin Burden, practice director for mobile devices at ABI, said in a recent Webinar. "We will get to the point where every phone becomes a smartphone, but it will be a slow march." According to ABI, smartphones will expand their market share from 15 percent of all handsets in the first quarter of 2009 to r9 percent in the last quarter of this year. By 2015, they could represent roughly 30 percent of all cell phone sales.
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