More than 1.2m smartwatches will be shipped in 2013 according to ABI, as consumers change their perceptions of wearable devices. “The strong potential emergence of smartwatches can be attributed to several reasons,” says senior analyst Joshua Flood. “Contributing factors include the high penetration of smartphones in many world markets, the wide availability and low cost of MEMS sensors, energy efficient connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0, and a flourishing app ecosystem.”

The burgeoning smartphone and apps market is certainly keeping analysts’ prediction machines busy: today sees two more sets of forecasts.

IDC claims more smartphones will ship globally this year than feature phones, for the first time. It claims the 918.6m smartphones that will ship in 2013 will account for 50.1% of the total mobile phones market. IDC picks out China, India and Brazil as key markets to watch, too.

Meanwhile, ABI Research’s latest forecasts focus on apps, claiming that 56bn smartphone apps will be downloaded this year – 58% of them on Android and 33% on iOS, with Windows Phone and BlackBerry stuck on 4% and 3% apiece.

Some 1.4bn smartphones and 268m tablets will be in active use by the end of this year, with Android taking the lion’s share of the former and iOS dominating the latter. The figures come from analyst ABI Research, which has come up with numbers for the amount of devices actually in use, rather than giving shipment figures. Of these 1.4bn smartphone devices, it says 57% (798m) will be running Android and 21% (294m) iOS. ABI adds there will be 45m Windows Phone and 20m Blackberry 10 handsets in use by the end of the year – enough, according to senior analyst Aapo Markkanen, “to keep these two in the game”.

Amazon needs to make $3 a month from apps or other content for each Kindle Fire it sells to turn a 20% profit over the device’s lifetime, according to ABI. The Kindle Fire is widely believed to be sold below cost price in a bid to keep consumers within the Amazon infrastructure and therefore sell to them. ABI believes that this is a viable strategy – albeit a defensive one. “Kindle Fire may look like an aggressive push into a whole new market, but it’s more of a defensive play, born out of necessity,” said senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. “If Amazon bet its post-PC future only on the web and apps, it would be dangerously exposed to the likes of Apple and Google.”

Cumulative global revenue from apps will have passed $30bn by the end of the year according to ABI Research, almost double the amount that apps had generated by the end of 2011. The number, which comes from ABI Research’s Mobile Application Markets Research Service (via TechCrunch), includes all revenue from pay-per-download apps, in-app purchases, subscriptions and in-app advertisements.

The size of the average iOS game has swelled to 60 megabytes according to ABI Research, up 42% since March. This, it says (via Inside Mobile Apps), is due to a combination of Retina display upgrades and Apple relaxing the limits on the size of 3G/4G-downloadable apps in the App Store. The size of the average iOS app has increased 16% since March, to 23 megabytes. ABI points out that while increased download limits can help developers to make ever-more-impressive games, these titles face stiff competition to remain installed on packed devices.

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