There were 50 million smartphones and wirelessly-enabled PDAs in use in the US at the end of 2009, according to CTIA, the wireless association's semiannual survey which it announced here in Las Vegas at the CTIA Wireless 2010 event. There are also now more than 285 million wireless connections in the US, which seems to include mobile phones as well as wireless aircards for laptops.
Wireless data usage
Thanks in no small part to those 50 million smartphones, wireless data service revenues increased 25.7 percent from the last half of 2008 to reach more than $22 billion for the last half of 2009. Data revenues made up 28 percent of all wireless carriers' revenues during the period. Of course, phones don't need to be smartphones to be data-capable: CTIA found that there are now more than 257 million data-capable devices in consumers’ hands, marking a small spike from the 228 million in the market at the end of 2008.
Text messages and picture messages
> More than 822 billion text messages sent and received on carriers’ networks during the last half of 2009
> That's almost 5 billion text messages per day at the end of the year
> During the entire calendar year 2009: More than 1.5 trillion text messages reported on carriers’ networks.
> Consumers sent more than 24.2 billion pictures and other multimedia messages during the second half of 2009.
> That’s more than twice the number from the previous year: Only 9.3 billion were reported for the second half of 2008.
For more from the CTIA survey, read the full release here
