For the first time, smartphones are outselling feature phones in China.
According to government research institute CATR, smartphone sales overtook sales of feature phones in April and accounted for 56.9% of all sales in June.
CATR’s stats for the first half, posted on C114. show Chinese also bought more 3G phones than 2G in the period – another first.
Altogether, 194.9m handsets were sold in China in the period - 106.87m 3G and 88.04m 2G.
Smartphones accounted for 48.7% of the volume over the six months, or 94.86m units.
But, underlining 2G's dominance in China, GSM remains the biggest single seller. GSM phones took 42.0% of the market, with W-CDMA in second place (27.3%), followed a long way back by cdma-2000 (14.5%), TD-SCDMA (13.1%) and cdma-1x (3.1%).
Worldwide phones sales were 398.4m in Q1, of which 145m were smartphones, according to IDC.