According to research firm Gartner, smartphones outsold feature phones during the second quarter for the first time. Feature phones are defined as basic mobile devices that lack a whole new level of technology featured in a smartphone.
Smartphones constituted 51.8% of the international sales of mobile devices, up by 46.5% in 2012. Gartner principal research analyst Anshul Gupta said that the growth was pushed by the sales in the sub-USD100 Android market.
"We have seen that smartphones are starting from around USD60 in 2013," Gupta stated. "That was not the case in the same quarter in 2012; then it was USD120 or maybe even higher. The gap between average feature-phone price and low-cost smartphone price has really closed in the last couple of quarters."
The low-cost smartphones aided in boosting the market share of Google's Android to 79% in this year's second from last year's 64.2%. The market share of Apple dropped from 18.8% to only 14.2% during the same period.
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