ps: I own a iPhone 4 which come heavily subsidized with a 2 yr data plan and a $35 non-smartphone which I bought, without any long term contract.
Also, another issue with smartphone is the battery life. They drain out really fast, finding a charger recharge a mobile twice a day just dun make sense in quite a lot of places in the world.
Till these issues are resolved, and unless countries are willingly to upgrade of their telecommunication infrastructure, my guess is that smartphones and non-smartphones are likely to coexist for a quite number of years. Sure, developed countries will continue to upgrade to something like Japan and South Korea.
The contract freebie "dumbphones" today are better than the $300 phones from 5 years ago. The oldschool Nokia candybars that placed calls and played Snake aren't even carried in stores anymore. Current smartphones may not dominate in the next two years, but at some point, carriers will just stop offering the current crop of dumbphones and the freebies will provide feature parity with current smartphones.
* Most of the population in developed countries, much less the world, do not work in jobs that require their phones to not have cameras.
* Do older people not have smartphones because they do not want/need them, or because of the perception that it cost too much?
I think the point of the article is that as smartphones begin to cost the same as regular phones, we will see a dramatic rise in adoption.