5 billion smartphones will ship between now and 2016, says Qualcomm

Everybody has a smartphone these days, and Qualcomm – AKA the world’s biggest mobile chipset manufacturer – reckons shipments will hit five billion by the close of 2016. 

This rapid growth will be fuelled by consumer expectations for ‘connectivity, battery life and portability,’ according to Qualcomm. And being one of the biggest players in the space means that Qualcomm’s business will go from strength-to-strength. 

The company’s latest quad-core S4 Snapdragon Pro chipset will become increasing prevalent inside smartphones as we near the end of Q4 and approach Q1 2013.

Already powering devices like the Nexus 4, Qualcomm’s S4 Pro is a series force to be reckoned with despite increased competition from Samsung, Intel, and Nvidia. 

We flew out to San Francisco few months back to get some hands-on time with the S4 Pro aboard a Qualcomm-built developer tablet. Initial benchmarks were impressive to say the least, offering almost twice the processing power of current dual-core setups. 

Qualcomm also chimed in on tablet and PC shipments, predicting combined sales of 650 million by 2016 – a low figure that reaffirms declining consumer demand for traditional PCs. 

Check out our benchmarks of Qualcomm’s S4 Snapdragon Pro chipset here, and read Damien’s first look at the Nexus 4 to get an indication of the type of processing power you can expect from Qualcomm’s next-gen chipset.