According to the latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report from International Data Corporation (IDC), the global smartphone market is on pace to grow 55% in 2011 (472 million shipments). But over the next four years, IDC says smartphone shipments will reach unprecedented new heights. By 2015, IDC estimates that worldwide smartphone shipments will reach 982 million.

The rapidly expanding smartphone market, IDC claims, will grow more than four times the rate of the overall mobile phone market this year. Why? Helping drive sales are falling average prices, increased phone functionality, and lower-cost data plans.

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The worldwide smartphone market is growing. And fast.

According to the latest projections by the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the global smartphone market is expected to grow 49.2% in 2011.

The growth will be driven by an ever-widening pool of consumers and enterprise users turning in their feature phones for more sophisticated smartphones.

The IDC’s research finds that smartphone vendors will likely ship more than 450 million smartphones in 2011 compared to the 303.4 million units shipped in 2010.

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IDC has been busy lately with its prediction for 2011, with one data point standing out from the rest as an indication to how massive the mobile application market already is, and how large it will continue to become.

According to its forecast, IDC says the number of downloaded apps is expected to increase from 10.9 billion worldwide in 2010 to more than 76.9 billion in 2014.  In addition, worldwide mobile apps revenues will experience similar growth, surpassing $35 billion in 2014.

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Noting the runaway growth of the mobile applications business (more than 300,000 mobile apps developed in just over three years), research firm IDC now estimates that global app revenues will top $35 billion by the end of 2014.

IDC also projects that over the next four years worldwide download totals will grow from 10.9 billion (in 2010) to 76.9 billion in 2014.

Observing that the expansion of the mobile applications market will continue to reach new devices like connected TVs, IDC maintains that the so-called “appification” of our world (defined as “broad categories of interactions and functions in both the physical and the digital worlds”) will continue to expand at warp speed.

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Research firm IDC has come out with new mobile advertising market share projections for the end of 2010 which peg Google as the clear-cut leader with a nearly 60% share.  For Apple’s iAd, IDC has dramatically lowered its expectations, indicating it will only garner roughly 8.4% of the market for 2010.

This is interesting considering that an earlier report from IDC had projected that Apple and Google would finish the year neck-and-neck, with each holding about 21% of the market.  The sudden change appears to come not from Apple grossly underperforming earlier expectations but from IDC, but rather grossly underestimating the total size of the U.S. mobile advertising market, and Google’s share of it.  An earlier report had cited a total market size of under $250 million for 2009, while the new report claims that 2009 saw a market of $368 million.

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News surrounding Android’s continued surge always seems to come at once.  Earlier today Millennial Media indicated Android ad-requests have grown 65% on its network since last month, and now research firm IDC has come out saying Android is set to overtake Symbian and iOS as the top smartphone platform in Europe.

Android devices represented 23 percent of Western Europe smartphone shipments in Q3, which remains behind Symbian and iOS in the region, but is expected to surge past both in 2011.  ”The iPhone was last year’s hot device and now people are looking for something different,” said IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo.

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It’s the time of year where we’ll begin to see a lot of surveys, studies and predictions for the holiday shopping season and especially the year ahead in terms of mobile usage, but like always, many seem to take things a bit too far.

Take, for example, a new survey out by the folks at IDC Retail Insights that indicates mobile shoppers will account for nearly 30% of all money spent this holiday shopping season in the U.S.  While it would certainly be a welcomed stat for mobile retailers and mobile marketers, the logic and methodology behind the study is shoddy at best.  Let’s take a closer look at how they arrived at such conclusions.

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