As growth in the high-end smartphone market slows, new data helps illustrate once again why low-cost smartphones and feature phones are so important. According to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the mobile phone user base in China grew 12% on-year in May to nearly 1.17 billion subscribers. Digitimes reports that 303.37 million of those users owned 3G-enabled phones and 813.39 million had access to the Internet. To help illustrate just how huge cell phone proliferation is in China, consider this: Only 274.07 million people in the country subscribed to fixed-line telephone services in May. Where smartphones are concerned, Samsung is currently the top-selling vendor while Apple sits at No.5, according to recent data from market research firms IDC and Strategy Analytics.
Read the full story at Boy Genius Report and read the Digitimes report here.