Smartphone shipments top 1.5b in 2016 with Apple leading in Q4

It appears that 2016 was a pretty good year for the smartphone industry, at least according to new data from Strategy Analytics. The analytics firm announced that smartphone shipments managed to hit an impressive 1.49 billion last year. That's a new record for the industry, and it represents a 3% year-over-year rise in total smartphone shipments from 2015.