With all of the focus on smart phones these days, it’s easy to forget that they make up only a small percentage of the overall video playback mobile phone market. DTC estimates that 827 million mobile phones shipped in 2010 supported video playback, but only a little more than a quarter of those phones were smart phones.
Source: DTC
Most of the mobile phones supporting video playback are feature phones, or “dumb” phones, many of which have video capability through the devices’ imbedded cameras that can also record short video clips. Although most associate video capabilities only with smart phones, the universe of phones capable of encoding and decoding video is much larger than the smart phone market. Of course, there are other features of smart phones that make them better suited for video consumption, such as more powerful processors, and larger and higher-resolution displays, than feature phones.
But for basic video consumption, smart phones are way behind their less technologically advanced feature-phone cousins, the plain old feature phones.
