Smartphones are the current ‘poster child’ of the converged mobile devices market and represent the fastest-growing segment of the global market. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), vendors shipped more than 174 million units in 2009 worldwide, an increase of 15 percent from the previous year.

In Asia, and in China in particular, the segment is booming. Apart from the well-documented resilient performance of China’s economy following the success of its government’s mega-stimulus package, other factors are contributing to this boom. A number of reports from market researchers and analysts and have been released recently, which along with input from leading industry players, shed some light on why Asia is leading the charge in the rapidly-growing smartphone segment.

On the revenue stream side, leading investment bank, Credit Suisse, released a report that showed that the increasing affordability of smartphones, with richer features such as larger screens and faster processors is encouraging owners in Asia (and around the world) to use their handsets for web browsing and instant messaging more. As a result, it predicts that non-SMS wireless broadband data revenues in Asia (ex-Japan) will grow from US$1.3 billion at the end of 2009 to US$14.5 billion at end of 2015. Importantly, Credit Suisse expects higher smartphone revenues to “lead directly to higher cash flows.”

In its report, Credit Suisse, forecasts the number of smartphone users in Asia will reach 347 million by 2015. With potential for huge sales growth such as this it’s hardly surprisingly that both global and local vendors, as well as brand new players, are climbing over each other as they rush to clamber aboard Asia’s smartphone bandwagon.

As market competition intensifies in the smartphone segment, communications service providers will increasingly seek compelling, high quality multimedia applications for end-users and enterprises. Making the careful selection of world-class solutions providers that can enable service providers as well as applications developers and hardware manufacturers to differentiate their products to reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction will become even more important for market success.

The gloves are off and the iPhone looks to finally have decent competition here in the US with the release of Droid today. AT&T’s exclusive agreement with Apple has pushed its competitor Verizon to develop their own phone that directly competes with iPhone.

It’s great to see a new smartphone on the market that has consumers and sour anti-Apple fans excited. It hasn’t caught the same trailblazing buzz that the iPhone created – but it’s doing a good job of getting noticed.

The advert below says it all and I must admit I would be tempted to leave AT&T/iPhone if my contract was nearly up.

Earlier this week in a timely shot across the bow, or perhaps chest puffing,  Apple announced that its  application store, now has “over  100,000 applications available” and added “the iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”

The iPhone currently has 125,000 developers in its program and more than 2 billion downloads – plus it’s a global phone unlike the Droid, which is available only in the US.  However, with more phones being developed on the Android platform some predict that Android based phones will overtake Apple in market share by 2012.

However, when it comes down to it – Apple is currently the standard for smartphones and every smartphone, including Droid, is defining itself on how it compares to the iPhone. Let the applications, chest-puffing and games begin.