Today, there are well over 2bn smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth. Over the next few years almost all of the people who don't yet have a phone will get one, and almost all of the phones on earth will become smartphones. A decade ago some of that was subject to debate - today it isn't. What all those people pay for data, and how they charge their phones, may be a challenge, but the smartphone itself is close to a universal product for humanity - the first the tech industry has ever had.
...The smartphone wars mean there's now a firehose of cheap, low-power, ever-more-sophisticated smartphone components available for anyone else to use - it's as though someone dumped a shipping container worth of Lego on the floor and we're working out what to make. In parallel, the contract manufacturers that make all of those smartphones can also make other things with those components. These two factors - the components and the contract manufacturers, together the supply chain - are behind the explosion of smart devices of every kinds - drones, wearables, internet of things, connected homes, cars, TVs and so on.
