Why is the tech market dominated by smartphones?

In the course of our tech coverage both local and abroad, it has become more and more prevalent that smartphones have practically dominated the technology market. And while we also strive to publish a good mix of stories in the IT sector, it’s apparent that the mobile market is the most aggressive.

Only today, a quick survey of our homepage shows that 23 out of 25 of the recent stories we published are all about the mobile market (smartphones and tablets combined). We did not bother checking the hundreds of stories we post every month but it’s no doubt, smartphones/tablets dominated the lot.

A quick survey of our last 10 gadgets reviews also showed 80% are smartphones. Our last 5 international coverages (New York, San Diego, Florida, London, Jakarta) were mostly smartphones (Jakarta was an exception as it was mostly about TVs).

I’m sure the reasons are obvious but here are our thoughts (and in our defense) on the matter.

• Mobile is probably the fastest growing market. The buying cycle has significantly shortened thru the years. We see new product announcements by the same brand almost every quarter.
• Handset ownership per user has increased such that a single consumer can easily own two or more handsets at the same time. It’s only in this market that we see this shift make a significant effect (not in laptop, camera or TV market).
• There are almost the same number of local brands as global brands that are into the smartphone market in the country.
• Smartphones enjoy a lot of support from the telcos thru subsidies and deferred plans. This makes them more affordable to consumers.
• There are a number of fiercely competing platforms — iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry.
• Smartphones are the most convergent device — communication, connectivity, entertainment, multimedia consumption, productivity, photography — all rolled into one.

So it’s not really that surprising that a majority of our coverage around here falls under that mobile category but now that we are more aware about it, we’ll have a more conscious effort in putting good mix of diverse content for our readers to go back to each and every day.