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Last year saw a record of  over 600 million smartphones out of about 1.6 billion phones shipped worldwide in what many see as a "Smartphone Revolution". Smartphones are getting more popular by the minute.


 Android is up 13%, iOS down 7%, BlackBerry down 81% … and Windows Phone up a massive 52%. Android is now the favourite smartphone operating system. As a result of its affiliation with Android, Samsung has seen its phone sales soar and had 25% of mobile phone shipments in 2012. Other manufacturers of  Android based smartphones such as LG, HTC, Sony and Huawei also experienced growth in sales figures. Apple's IOS is now experiencing the the heat of competition from Android (Samsung) as its lost ground in its key markets in China and US due to the success of the Samsung Galaxy S3.
This battle for more market share will continue through 2013 global smartphone installed base is expected to grow by 33% this year and double in size by 2016. With projections that smartphones will be twice the number of feature phones coupled with its market share of 60%, its no wonder why mobile phone manufacturer have been busy trying to woe customers with ad campaigns geared towards improving sales and market share.

 Nigeria is surely not left out of this revolution, for example, Nigeria is the largest market for Blackberry in Africa as we speak and this speaks volumes of our own Smartphone Revolution.
Countries with major installed smartphone bases include China, United States, Germany, Nigeria, India, Brazil and Russia (Courtesy: StrategyAnalytic). The Nigerian market is the tenth largest in the world in terms of mobile subscribers and I can modestly estimate that 1 in every 8 mobile subscribers uses a smartphone in Nigeria, and this would translate to about two (2) million smartphone users. With the introduction of many low price Android phones into the Nigerian market by Huawei, Samsung and others, these numbers can only go higher.
Smartphones have come to stay and are now part of our everyday life and as more people embrace it in Nigeria, a whole lot of opportunities abound.

What are these opportunities?you might ask, I'll be discussing them in the concluding part of this article next week.

Its obviously not news that Airtel Africa plans to launch WiFi in 17 African countries, though no official statement has been made yet by the company.

GigaOM has learned that pan-African operator Airtel is deploying a large-scale carrier Wi-Fi network using Ruckus and Alcatel-Lucent gear. With mainly 2G networks to its name today, Airtel will use Wi-Fi to jump start its mobile data services

WiFi is a popular technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data wirelessly (using radio waves) over a computer network, including high-speed Internet connections.

That being said, the primary reason for this move is to provide access to high speed internet to subscribers on predominantly 2G networks. Let me elaborate further that this means; on a 2G data network, the ideal data speeds for GPRS and EDGE are about 80kbps and 240kbps, however on WiFi, the speed ranges from 1Mbps to 150Mbps ( depending on the range and wireless protocol used). That's at least quadruple the capacity available on a 2G network.

In Nigeria, however, 3G, 3.5G and HSDPA, HSPA+ are available in major Nigerian cities and to my greatest surprise even in my village. (somewhere in Anambra State). HSPA+ is currently the fastest access technology in Nigeria as I write and stands at 42Mbps as advertised by Airtel, Etisalat and Glo, though nobody ever gets that much but that's another story for another day.
The advent of WiFi will allow cheaper non 3G phones to have access to high speed data which is really really cool as this is bound to increase the number of data subscribers on the African continent.

As cool as this sounds, my only grouse with this that Airtel plans to start in Niger as reported. No disrespect intended to Niger Rep. but from a business point of view, it just doesn't add up. Here's why I say so

•  WiFi can serve as an alternative data access method and also serve as provide extra capacity especially in densely populated areas such as Lagos metropolis where almost all networks experience congestion.
• Having worked on projects in both countries, and I can confidently estimate the number of active daily data subscribers in Airtel Niger to be between 11-15k, while in Nigeria, there are over 590k daily data subscribers. 
• The growth in the telecommunication is unparalleled anywhere in the African continent. Nigeria added 5 million new mobile subscriptions in 2012 alone.
• The launch of Mobile Number Portablity (MNP) will give them the advantage, attract new subscribers to their network and in turn increase their data subscriber base.
• Data is very BIG business in Nigeria already. Soon data revenues will rival that of voice.
• Nigerian subscribers are more active online than ever before, with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, Whatsapp, BBM being very popular among the young generation.

Need I say more than I have already. Its a good initiative but it will yield much more if it is launched in Nigeria.