At a recent printer launch in Hong Kong (quick disclaimer: I travelled there as a "guest" of HP, which means they paid my plane fare and hotel room), HP's Senior Vice President of Imaging and Printer opened up his presentation not talking about printers at all. Well, not directly, anyway.

He talked about smartphone adoption in the Asia Pacific region, which he claimed is growing 31% year on year. Smartphone use is exploding, and a quick walk around Hong Kong's tech markets confirmed this to me without a doubt. Every second phone was a smartphone, every third a dodgy clone of an existing smartphone, and the first phone in line was invariably a "cute" feature phone of the type beloved in South East Asia. I snapped a quick shot of the LG KF350, quite an old phone now, simply on its promise of being made of Ice Cream. A phone made of Ice Cream would have its melting problems, to be sure, but retailers would love all the repeat customers. It was a lonely looking phone amongst its smartphone brethren, however.

Closer to home, Smartphones are getting ridiculously cheap. There's a slew of Android handsets across all vendors available at around $49 a month, including some seriously tempting models such as HTC's Desire. That kind of price point used to score you a very simple phone, or perhaps a feature phone, but no more. Simple phones are becoming harder to buy, to the chagrin of some, and app-centric smartphones are rapidly tumbling in price. I doubt we'll see such generous terms for Apple's iPhone 4 whenever it launches here, and undoubtedly some of this price pressure is in place to pre-load customers onto 24-month plans before iPhone 4 frenzy properly hits.

Smartphones are great if you use them, but there's still a significant proportion of the target marketplace that don't, but will probably end up with a smartphone as their next phone simply because this kind of bargain basement pricing makes it a bit silly to settle on a "standard" phone if a "smart" model is available at the same kind of price.