Author: Rebecca

A report from IDC has showed that even as it matures in some countries, others are still taking off.

The IDC has now released its report on the growth of the smartphone market for 2014 and it has shown that while mature marketplaces are forecasted to grow by only 4.9 percent, emerging regions are expected to keep up a tremendous rate of 32.4 percent.

Some of the regions of the world are experiencing faster growth than the average reported by IDC.

According to the report, the Indian smartphone market saw a massive 300 percent growth rate in 2013. As only 10 percent of the over 700 million users of cell phones had smartphones at that time, it was only natural that the growth rate be exceptionally high. By the first quarter of this year, the penetration rate of these mobile devices had already reached a much higher 29 percent.

In emerging countries, the dynamics of the growth of the smartphone market are different than in mature regions.

For instance, many emerging marketplaces do not have a broad scale fixed line infrastructure. Therefore, this means that it provides an ecosystem that is much more favorable for the use of mobile broadband technologies for the delivery of high speed internet connections than is the case in mature markets, where that infrastructure is considerably better established.

The demand within emerging regions is, therefore, driving growth in both smartphone shipments and in mobile broadband subscriptions. Two very large and yet highly different examples of this occurrence are going on in India and in China.

In China, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported that at the end of 2012, there was a 74.5 percent growth in mobile internet users to the most recent figure, which is 81 percent. Clearly, this is a notably higher growth rate and the CNNIC is calling the smartphones the primary driving force for internet use in the country.

On the other hand, in India, Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins, indicated in the report called the 2014 Internet Trends that while smartphone use is tremendous, revenues are very large, and the opportunity is considerable, companies are still seeing tiny margins. At the moment, only 4 percent of the budgets of advertisers in the country is being spent on advertising in the smartphone market.

As the number of cyber attacks over traditional computers, smartphones, and tablets grow, this is worrying.

Technology news reports are continually announcing the latest massive cyber attacks and data breaches, but this doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact on many people in the United Kingdom, as a new survey has shown that many are not taking mobile security all that seriously.

It would be expected that these headlines would cause the average users to take protective measures.

However, this does not appear to be the case. The survey was conducted on behalf of ZenMate by OnePoll. It involved the participation of 2,000 respondents from the United Kingdom. What it determined was that there is an overall apathy present among smartphone users when it comes to their own mobile security. Fewer than half of the people who were surveyed said that they take any action to ensure that they are using protected connections or that they secure their browsing data when using their smartphones.

Over 45 percent said that they didn’t even take the basic mobile security step to use a password to lock their devices.

Without even using a smartphone password to lock the device, if that gadget is ever stolen, the thief would be able to gain instant access to any apps, contacts, or other personal data contained within the mobile device. This is quite surprising, when taking into consideration all of the attention that is being received by the prevalence of cyber attacks, overall.

Moreover, with reports that suggest that the GCHQ and the NSA have been monitoring online communications, it would be easy to assume that smartphone users would want to take a few extra steps to remain protected against data theft and other related threats. The results of this survey, however, clearly indicate otherwise when it comes to the typical British smartphone using consumer.

Only 41.5 percent of the survey participants said that they took precautionary mobile security measures, even when asked about their habits when using unsecured public networks. This aligns well with a recent Ofcom report that indicated that people don’t usually think twice about their privacy when they access public WiFi connections.