That headline takes a minute to settle. BI Intelligence reported on Monday that research firm IHS recently compared the history of the combined smartphone and tablet market against the rest of the consumer electronics market (CE). Consumer Electronics encompasses digital cameras, home appliances, audio and video equipment, televisions and video game consoles.

Tablets and Smartphones combined accounted for $355 billion dollars globally against $344 billion dollars globally across the rest of the consumer electronics products. Studies like this definitely give credence to the words mobile first.

Business Insider said: “Smartphones and tablets now all carry a quality substitute for almost every product in the CE category: TV (mobile video, YouTube), audio equipment (iTunes, Pandora), cameras and camcorders (a standard on mobile device hardware), video game consoles (mobile games and apps).”

Of course the one product category that’s safe from the rise of the mobile connected device is the appliance. I don’t see smartphones and tablets washing and drying the clothes or dishes anytime soon.

“Consumer demand for smartphones and tablets has been flourishing in the past few years while sales growth for CE products has languished in the doldrums,” said Randy Lawson, senior principal analyst for semiconductors at IHS. “The fact that these two product categories are on their own able to generate more OEM factory revenue than the entire CE market illustrates the overwhelming popularity of smartphones and tablets. Meanwhile, the CE market has gone flat, with many of the major product types experiencing either low growth or declines in revenue during the past six years.”

This validates consumer electronics giant Best Buy’s decision to close multiple big box stores while at the same time opening more of their Best Buy Mobile branded stores.

This also bolster’s new job categories. While jobs in factories assembling refrigerators, microwaves and ovens may be dwindling, jobs for developers and designers of mobile apps and supporting hardware are on the rise.

One of the most interesting things revealed in the IHS research is the increase in mobile/tablet revenue from 2007, the year the iPhone was released, to 2013. In 2007 smartphones and tablet revenue was $41.2 billion dollars. In 2013 the same category was $354.3 billion. While tablets weren’t widely available in 2007, Blackberry, Handspring/Palm and Kyocera had smartphones on the market. Sony, HP, Compaq, Palm, and Handspring had popular PDA’s out which also fit in the category.

IHS predicts that while smartphone and table revenue will continue to increase overall CE revenue will decrease 5% by 2017 to $327 billion.

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