If you look at the smartphone:handset chart, North America was above everyone else for years, then Western Europe began catching up. Of course, the US has an o

If you look at the smartphone:handset chart, North America was above everyone else for years, then Western Europe began catching up. Of course, the US has an oligopoly running the wireless market: Verizon, who also controls the local loop in much of the country has the most advanced network. Then AT&T has the next best data network, although their voice and other service leaves something to be desired. Sprint is next, and has very little LTE rolled out, even in major markets - even their 4G can be spotty. Then T-Mobile, which has barely been surviving. This oligopoly funded a lot of the high-end smartphone development. Companies wanted people signed up to those two-year $100 a month or more plans, and with numbers like that, the cost of the phone is relatively low. It makes sense for the oligopoly to subsidize a high-end phone people will like, so they'll be more willing to take that two-year, $100+ a month plan. Smartphone models get better and better - I have a Galaxy S and sometimes use a Galaxy S4 - the improvement in the three years from the S to the S4 has been very dramatic. My Galaxy S feels so slow as molasses and dated in comparison. Even the GPS uplink seems to take forever on the S, relative to the S4. Android activates 1.5 million devices a day. That daily activation rate has only been accelerating over the past few years. So far 900 million Android devices have been activated. Obviously the acceleration of the daily activation rate has to slow sooner or later. Android is not yet mature by any means. Google's implementation of staged rollouts for Android is less than two months old. And they are very welcome from my end - I beta-test but was terrified of releasing an update to popular apps for a variety of reasons. Now I can roll it out to a small percentage - if there's a problem I can rollback the update, if it looks OK I can keep rolling out to more people until the update is all out. Google's app translation coordination service trial just kicked in on Friday. While it's mentioned times are still good for app developers, one reason for that is tablets. Even if the smartphone market gets saturated, tablets still have room to grow. And tablets are just one of the possible Android form factors.