Recent reports on the mobile market shows there are currently about 5 billion phones worldwide, 30% of which are smartphones. The leading platform is Android with about 49% of market share (approx. 300,000 units) followed by iOS with 19% share. Apple’s platform was in the lead until last year, when trends turned in many markets worldwide. 

Hungary was one of the first to register a greater number of Android users over iOS in January, 2011. “We think it is due to Telenor’s efforts to put Android in its focus of communication,” said Zoltán Takács, the company’s product development and innovation manager. At Telenor, 50% of the mobiles sold are smartphones and 40% of them run an Android operating system.

Mobile internet usage is also increasing exponentatially, with Telenor having doubled the number of users to 478,000 since December 2010, and costumers transferring about 1.7Gb data in an average month, (41% of the total data traffic). 

Due to global innovations and market trends, mobile payment solutions could be the next solution to be widespread, with the current (2011) $240 billion market forecast to grow to $670 by 2015. Last year, Telenor joined the MasterCard Mobile allience to provide NFC-based services. The related application has been downloaded 10,000 times from the Android Market, and “is used by about 50% of the transactions by 50% of the users,” Takács told the BBJ.  Anikó Jóri-Molnár