Although the advancement of technology has given us such smartphones as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Nexus One, Nokia N900 and soon the HTC EVO 4G, the vast majority of people in the United States of America still use the feature phone or dumb phone as it is known reports an article over on business insider.

However, according to Nielsen, all that will change over the course of the next year and a half and a figure of 49 percent of US mobile phone owners will carry a smartphone by the third quarter of 2011 which will be up some 21 percent to what it currently is.

Therefore there is plenty of room for smartphone growth in the mobile market and that growth will be hard fought over by such smartphone makers as Apple, Nokia, Research In Motion, Google, Microsoft Palm and others all wanting to snatch a large piece for themselves.

As it stands, the top hogs of the smartphone arena are Research In Motion with their BlackBerry smartphones and of course Apple with their iconic iPhone, but the smartphone growth chart does show there is still plenty of room for further growth.