Earlier this month, M:Metrics celebrated their 3rd anniversary; happy birthday M:Metrics. With it they released an interesting set of metrics that compares the last three years of device capabilities and growth:

At launch, the mobile content sector was young and promising, with expectations high but device capabilities low. For example:

United States Subscriber
Penetration: Device Capabilities

Device Capability

JAN 2005

JAN 2008

Growth Rate

3G

—

25%

¥ 

Cameraphone

14%

63%

4.5x

Smartphones

2%

7%

 3.5x

Browser (WAP 2.0 or HTML)

22%

75%

 3.4x

Video Playback

18%

60%

 3.3x

“Over the past three years, we have seen a significant evolution in device capabilities and adoption of significantly more capable handsets by mobile subscribers, which have been key drivers of increased use of the mobile medium,” said McAteer.

With 54.2 million subscribers, 3G penetration grew from virtually nothing to 25 percent subscriber penetration from January 2005 through January 2008 in the United States. Smartphone growth followed a similar trajectory.

Growth in penetration jumped by a factor of 3.5 from January 2005, when only 2.9 million people owned a phone running the Windows, Symbian, Palm, RIM or Apple operating system, to the same period three years later. Today, 14.3 million people own a smartphone, and smartphone users account for over 25 percent of all mobile Internet consumption.

ceo

[Source — M:Metrics]