NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The media are not wrong in reporting on the Great smartphone battle. They are just not right enough. With numbers--as in concepts--it's always context that counts.

But don't tell that to The Los Angeles Times. They reported on global smartphone shipments numbers released by International Date Corp. and bore right in on the 2011 total, which was up an impressive 61.3%. From there, the LA Times went in the typical direction: talking about who was number one, Samsung for the year,

Apple

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in the 4th quarter, as well as who was the year's biggest loser. Good guess:

Nokia

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.

It was, from start to finish, a battle-of-the-smartphone story. That's typical of the media: report on who is up and who is down, as if smartphones were politics or the American League East.

But there is more to life and business and smartphones than that. We need to know where the number fits into the larger scheme of consumer behavior. Forbes gets right to it in its headline: "Smartphone Shipments Top PCs For The First Time Ever." Whoa. That's big, and Forbes pressed home the point in the lead: "2011 marked the beginning of a major shift toward mobile computing."

We knew that, of course, but the scale and speed of the shift is remarkable, with a myriad of implications. It was worth going beyond who-is-up and who-is-down boilerplate to note it.

At the time of publication, Fuchs had no positions in any of the stocks mentioned in this column.

Marek Fuchs was a stockbroker for Shearson Lehman Brothers and a money manager before becoming a journalist who wrote The New York Times' "County Lines" column for six years. He also did back-up beat coverage of The New York Knicks for the paper's Sports section for two seasons and covered other professional and collegiate sports. He has contributed frequently to many of the Times' other sections, including National, Metro, Escapes, Style, Real Estate, Arts & Leisure, Travel, Money & Business, Circuits and the Op-Ed Page.

For his "Business Press Maven" column on how business and finance are covered by the media, Fuchs was named best business journalist critic in the nation by the Talking Biz website at The University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Fuchs is a frequent speaker on the business media, in venues ranging from National Public Radio to the annual conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

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