Holy iCrap! 1 in 10 smartphones in the UK will be iPhone by 2012

I know we Brits love our iPhones but this could start to get a tad silly. According to the latest data published by mobile research agency mobileSquared, it’s predicted that one in ten smartphones that are active in the UK will be an iPhone by the end of 2012.

Further still, as 2015 wraps up – bare with me here – the market will top 9.4 million iPhones or 11% of the total devices used in the UK.

Now if that’s just a little too much future gazing, the number of iPhones in the UK is forecast to rise 195% from 2.17 million at the end of 2009 to 6.4 million by the end of this year. That’s 7.9% of the market in the UK touting Apple’s smartphone – death grip and all.

Interestingly, the report does, however, peg this year as a spike, suggesting that in the years to come iPhone growth will slow as Android phones continue to flood the market.

In terms of iPhones being sold, O2 is said to still have the edge despite losing its exclusivity period and “is well on course to top the 4 million mark by the end of the year”, having sold an average of 166,667 iPhones per-month over the past 6 months. Of course, the climate is slightly different now with the iPhone 4 on sale and all of the major operators offering the device.

I’ve also received eye witness reports that Apple’s flagship London store is still seeing 2.5 hour queues for the company’s latest smartphone many days after launch.

But, ultimately, these kind of predictions often turn out to be a bit, well, meaningless. They either state the obvious or involve far too much conjecture. Also the mobile landscape moves at lightning speed lately so it’s arguably a fool’s game to get out the crystal ball. For example, I don’t know of anybody that predicted that BlackBerry would be a hit with teens in the UK but that was before RIM started offering lower-cost devices on a pre-pay deal and with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) data included.

That’s why I try to keep the predictions that I make at least ten years ahead so that by the time I’m wrong, they’ll hopefully be forgotten.

Update: The headline has been changed to reflect that by mobile phones we mean smartphones, however loose of a definition that is too.