Smart Phone Penetration 56% in 2013?

If current trends continue to hold,  the number of U.S. consumers with a smart phone will more than double from 93.1 million at the end of 2011 to 192.4 million by 2016, when 58.5 percent of the total U.S. population will have a smart phone, eMarketer projects. 


One obvious caveat is that current adoption trends are driven by heavily-subsidized smart phones. Logic suggests an end to such subsidies would drastically reduce the smart phone adoption rate.


A more likely development is reduced subsidies for high-end phones, with a shift of end user demand to the more-subsidized smart phones, which undoubtedly would  not be the high-end devices.