40% Of Macworld Attendees Don’t Have A Smartphone – Estimate [Macworld 2011]

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SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Here’s a surprising statistic from Macworld 2011: about 40% of show goers don’t have a smartphone.

That was the number given to me at a meetup on the show’s last night. It was from someone who ran a competition all week in one of the booths. To win a prize, entrants had to download an app to their smartphone — and about 40% didn’t have a device that could download apps.

“I was really surprised,” said the source, who asked that neither she nor her company be identified. “Especially in a city like San Francisco and at a show like Macworld.”

Consider us surprised also.

I asked whether these people just didn’t want to install some random app on their iPhone. The source said, no, they wanted to enter the draw but didn’t have a device to enter it with.

We talked about it for a while. It was definitely odd. The source was running the competition all day, every day for three days, and saw a lot of people come through.

They designed the competition around an app because they figured everyone at Macworld would have an iPhone; but no — almost half didn’t. And they didn’t have an Android or Palm phones either (the app is cross platform).

Definitely odd. They only thing we could think of is that Macworld is still a “Mac world” — it attracts an older crowd, the Mac User Group set, who may not have adopted the iPhone yet.

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