Over 1 billion smartphones have been shipped worldwide in 2013, which is the most ever shipped in a single year to date. That’s exciting new, and not all that surprising since smartphones are cheaply available in almost every market. Persons can walk into a store and pick up a decent Android handset for less than $100 these days (in certain markets), so don’t be shocked if in the coming years phone makers will choose to do away with the feature phone.

And, for the first time ever, more smartphones were shipped to retailers when compared with feature phones, or dumb phones if you will.

According to data from the IDC, smartphone vendors shipped 1,004.2 million smartphones in 2013, which is a massive increase of 38.4 percent from the 725.3 million units shipped in the year of 2012. Among all vendors, Samsung managed to ship 313.9 million devices, followed by Apple far behind with 153.4 million smartphones shipped. Furthermore, IDC claims that Apple has seen its global market share slip from 18.7 percent to 15.3 percent, even though the Cupertino giant experienced record shipment volumes during the 4th quarter of 2013.

Apparently, Apple lost its market share to Asian companies such as Lenovo, LG, and Huawei.

To put the 1 billion number into perspective, the world population is estimated to be around 7 billion. So, in 2013, companies shipped one smartphone for every seven people (roughly). Think about how significant of a number that is.

Question, do you have a smartphone or a dumb phone? I have both because nothing beats the battery life of a dumb Nokia phone sitting uncharged for with moderate use for  nearly two weeks. Let us know in the comments below!

[via IDC]