ABI: Android King Of End-Of-2013 "1.4 Billion Smartphone" Estimate

This week the folks at ABI have released a study that predicts a massive 1.4 billion smartphones to be in-use by the end of 2013, 798 million of them Android-based. This set of numbers also suggests that Windows Phone will be in around 45 million smartphones while Apple will retain the number 2 spot with 294 million units – iPhones, the lot of them. This study suggests that by the end of this year the world will have 268 million tablets in-use – seem to you like there's a bit of a difference in the way we use "smart" electronics?

This set of studies is, of course, all based on estimates and analysis, here suggesting that the number of tablets we'll see by the end of this year represents a massive 125 percent growth over 2012's final set. Of this 2013 year-end set, 62 percent will be Apple's hardware while 28 percent will be Android-based. That's quite the flip-flop compared to how the smartphone universe is trending.

ABI has predicted that 20 million BlackBerry 10 devices will be up and running by the end of 2013 – this boding relatively well for the company that just launched their new operating system here in the first quarter of the year. While some have a less-than-hopeful outlook for the company formerly known as RIM (now just called BlackBerry), even 20 million devices (still less than Windows Phone) is better than none. Windows Phone's numbers on the end-of-2013 predictions chart shows Microsoft's mobile OS to be hitting at around 3 percent of the market's total.

The team at ABI let it be known that the annual smartphone growth rate has been factored in here to get that final 1.4 billion units was a fabulous 44 percent. That number is down from their previous reports showing 2012's 45 percent growth rate over the year before, this 1 percent change either signifying that we're reaching a plateau or that we're simply having a slightly irregular amount of sales change.

[via Venture Beat]