The Biggest Thing Since E-mail

Jim Cramer pounds the table for Smart Phones:

As big and as game-changing as the personal computer and the Internet were, I believe the mobile Internet—the integration of voice, data, video, and storage in one handheld device—will be more lucrative than both. Maybe both put together. That may sound far-fetched now, but these devices, chock-full of applications and hardware that have begun to rival those of personal computers, have finally realized the elusive holy grail. As any twentysomething, or even middle-schooler, knows, once you procure a smartphone, you can throw away pretty much every publication, every guide, every television, every camera, every music device, heck, every gizmo you have, save your toaster oven. You just don’t need ’em anymore.
It’s not just the dazzling technology that’s driving things. It’s the size of the market and the speed at which companies and consumers are getting onboard. It took a half-dozen years and a host of competitors like Dell, Gateway, and Compaq to produce personal computers cheap enough to entice the masses. Thanks to the substantial subsidies offered by Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile in their endless battles for market share, Americans are buying up smartphones and calling plans much faster than they bought PCs.
And the U.S. market is tiny versus the overseas arena. Beijing alone just committed $40 billion to build a smartphone network that will cover the whole nation, and the big telephone companies in China plan on subsidizing the phones with the same zeal as the American firms—obviously with millions more customers. Currently, there are as many as 4 billion cell-phone users worldwide, but only 12 percent use smartphones. Given the superiority of the product and the aggressive pricing, I expect we will see a total replacement of dumb phones with smart ones rather quickly. You’re talking about a market that could grow eightfold in just a few years.

Posted by on August 18th, 2009 at 10:17 am


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