Smartphone avg selling price drops while growth reaches 33%

It's good news for consumers when smartphone pricess drop and as I wrote last week you can still pick up perfectly capable devices for minimal cost. IDC just released their latest forecast that shows an expected 32.7 percent growth in smartphone shipments with a 9 percent drop in average selling price.

We will approach nearly 1 billion units in 2013 and as smartphones pass up feature phones there is no looking back as smartphones become the mobile handset of choice. We even see growth in smartphone sales in emerging markets with a reported 64.8 percent of all smartphone shipped appearing there, up from 43.1 percent in 2010.

Smartphone average selling price (ASP) was $443 in 2011 and in 2013 it is down to $372, with predictions of it dropping to $309 by 2017.

Ryan Reith, program manager for IDC's Mobility Trackers, states:

Smartphones have become increasingly common in emerging markets and it is often the first affordable means of computing for these markets. These are markets where average personal income is far less than in developed markets, and therefore vendors have been forced to create smartphone computing experiences for the low end of the market.

Smartphones today are more powerful than all of our computers just a couple of years ago and as Ryan stated they are now the primary computing platform for many folks around the world.

I appreciate LTE speeds as much as the next enthusiast, however 3G data is just fine for the majority of tasks on a smartphone and this is where manufacturers are still able to cut costs and pass along the savings to consumers.