In Five Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones

Feature phones are not the future. Of course that verges on tautology; of course everyone will have a smartphone, until everyone has something smaller and better and even more integrated into the fabric of our lives, like Google Glasses or cybernetic jawbone/retinal implants or whatever Charles Stross dreams up next. But when, exactly? I've spent a good chunk of my life wandering around and writing about the developing world, and as lots of folks have recently argued, that's still feature-phone territory, and will stay so for the foreseeable future. OK. Fair enough. But when precisely does the foreseeable future end? Because when the smartphone revolution hits the developing world, that's when things are going to get really interesting, because it will also be their computer revolution and Internet revolution, all at the same time. I'm particularly interested in sub-Saharan Africa (and it seems I'm not the only one around here) but it's particularly hard to make predictions about sub-Saharan Africa, in large part because you still have to take all the statistics that come out of there with a sizable grain of salt. That said, here are a few interesting nuggets. Current smartphone penetration estimates range from 3% to 17%, but I'm most convinced by Samsung's estimate of ~7%, up from 5% last year. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But:

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