Smartphones now account for 50% of all U.S. mobile phone ownership

[Mookie Carver]

Market research firm Nielsen today announced that half of all mobile phone subscribers in the United States now own a smartphone.

According to data compiled through February 2012, smartphones have grown to account for 49.7 percent of all mobile phones, up considerably from 36 percent just one year ago.

Of the handsets sold in the last three months, Android remains the top draw for new buyers with 48 percent of the market, but it's followed closely by iOS at 43 percent.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-574...mobile-phones/

Basically the mobile revolution is real and reached the point of never turning back.

Late '12/13 will see the most exciting jump in mobile processing tech yet with mobile CPU's double the power of their predecessors while retaining superior power consumption. Even greater will be the jump in mobile GPU tech with heavyweight chip vendors promising 5x to 10x power for next year.

By extension mobile gaming as a real and legitimate gaming market segment is also here to stay and growing beyond the technological limitations of traditional dedicated game players and their antiquated distribution models.

The low cost/ high volume nature of mobile gaming will continue to exert downward price pressure on the traditional home console market eventually contributing to the brake and demise of the oppressive and degenerate mainstream-corporate-dudebro-gaming-industrial complex.

Be strong, we've made it this far!

[Nuckles87]

Kind of an obvious thing to happen. As smart phones are getting cheaper, classic cell phones are going to become less and less relevant. Won't be long until we don't even see older style phones on the market anymore.

[Beat]

Honestly I thought this milestone was reached like a year ago. I figured it was around 60%-65% now.

[QuadTails]

I still know some people with very basic, prepaid phones. They still serve a purpose in the market, although they're starting to fade away. Some people just don't need a feature packed cellphone.

That and you can easily get a prepaid smartphone these days pretty cheap.