Nokia, Samsung join Apple in cheap smartphones push. Cheap Smartphone Tsunami Coming (NASDAQ:AAPL, NYSE:MMI, NASDAQ:GOOG, NYSE:NOK, NASDAQ:MSFT, NASDAQ:RIMM. Consultants from Deloitte are predicting that 2012 will be the year of the “dumb” smartphone. The rising popularity of smartphones coupled with the decreasing cost of components is leading to a flurry of new smartphones that will hit the market this year and cost less than $100. However, Deloitte reports that these affordable versions will lack many of the bells and whistles that we’ve come to expect and feature mainly touch screens, WIFI, cameras, e-mail, instant messaging, and full keyboards as the smartphone basics. Deloitte wrote, “Many consumers, particularly middle majority adopters, are likely to consider phones as smart if they have touch screens or full keyboards and not what intangible OS is under the hood.”
Most of the phones will also lack 3G capability and instead run on slower data networks such as GRPS and EDGE. Here’s how smartphone stocks reacted to the news: Apple Inc. Motorola, Inc. Google Inc. Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK): NOK shares recently traded at $5.64,. Check out Eric Schmidt’s must-see Mobile World Congress keynote. Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Mobile World Congress keynotes have always been interesting, but his keynote yesterday just about floored me as he put on his futurist hat with complete sincerity. It’s not only a good watch, it’s required viewing. Now you can check it out for yourself, as Google has just uploaded the entire keynote to YouTube. Skip past the opening Android on Chrome demonstration (though it’s still cool), and you’ll see Schmidt discuss the digital divide, how technology will fundamentally shape society in the future, and how tiny robots will let us experience remote events in holographic 3D.
It’s also worth watching for choice quotes like this: “Computer science is more than writing code and coding is more than writing programs… Developers are the engineers of human freedom.” VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. U.S. Smartphone market analysis Q2 2010, creating Smartphone Hits, ... China moves up value chain in Africa. $100 Shuidi smartphone from China might change landscape. Report: The Rise of Smartphones, Apps and the Mobile Web.
Nielsen’s State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report provides a snapshot of the current mobile media landscape and audiences in the U.S. and highlights the potential power of mobile commerce in the near future. Key findings: The majority of 25-34 and 18-24 year olds now own smartphones (64% and 53% respectively); The majority of smartphone owners (62%) have downloaded apps on their devices and games are the top application category used in the past 30 days; The number of smartphone subscribers using the mobile Internet has grown 45 percent since 2010; 87 percent of app downloaders (those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days) have used deal-of-the-day websites like Groupon or Living Social; Younger groups text the most.
In Q3, teens 13-17 sent and received the most text messages (an average of 3,417 each month). For more, download State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report Q3 2011. Top 10 telecoms predictions in 2012. Prediction 1: Regulation The battle over mobile broadband spectrum and national broadband initiatives will be the key regulatory themes in Asia Pacific in 2012. While Asia’s 3G and now 4G subscriber base continues to grow, limited spectrum available to operators will become an increasingly contentious issue in the region. While many markets have already auctioned LTE spectrum, there will be increasing calls for more bands - particularly in the 700 MHz band - to be opened to mobile operators. Spectrum refarming will be another issue that is a gray area in many countries, and while 2G network shutoffs are still not feasible in most countries, this will become an option for operators who can’t secure enough spectrum.
On the fixed broadband side, national broadband plans are well underway in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia with Indonesia becoming the most recent country to announce such a plan. Prediction 2: M&A activity Prediction 3: Smartphones Prediction 4: Mobile broadband. Chetan Sharma: Technology & Strategy Consulting. Save the date: Mobile Future Forward 2012 - Sept 10, 2012 Mobile Future Forward is a gathering of some of the most influential minds in the mobile industry.
The experts and visionaries from around the world will discuss and debate the future of mobile industry. In proud partnership with Synchronoss Technologies Inquiries: info@mobilefutureforward.com A Tale of Two Mobile Markets - China and India Download PDF Next weekend, on March 3rd around noon China Standard Time to be precise, China will sign up its one billionth mobile subscription. In 2011, the global GDP growth was 2.7% according to the World Bank. All of the top 6 global operators by subscriptions are from China and India.
Having worked in both of these markets over the last decade, I have always seen China and India as two of the most dynamic mobile markets in the world. In China, China Mobile monopolizes the market with over 66% of the market. China Mobile Market by the Numbers. China is the world’s largest mobile market with almost 1 billion mobile Internet users. As we enter the Year of the Dragon, which began Monday with the Chinese New Year, the huge China mobile market is growing at breakneck speed. In 2011, mobile connections increased almost 17 percent and soon will top 1 billion. Drawn by the both the sheer size of the opportunity and the rapid growth trajectory, mobile handset makers are introducing new phones in an effort to grab a share of the market. This infographic presents the numbers that have major vendors targeting China mobile users in general and smartphone users in particular.
Data sources: IDC, CNNIC The Size of the China Mobile Market by the Numbers China Mobile Market by the Numbers placeholder Content successfully copied to clipboard. Gartner: 54.8 million tablets will be sold in 2011. Gartner on Wednesday hinted that media tablets---think Apple's iPad---may test sales of mobile devices in 2011 as 54.8 million units are shipped. The research firm provided its tablet outlook almost in passing as it handicapped smartphone sales for the third quarter. However, that passing line raises an interesting question. Will tablets ding smartphone sales? Apple's 10-inch iPad won't hurt smartphones because it's too big. But if 7-inch tablets take off---an assumption where the jury is still out---it's plausible that some of those sales will come at the expense of smartphones. As one of our readers noted recently: The best move may be a dumb phone and a smart tablet.
It's certainly something to ponder. A few other threads from Gartner's third quarter smartphone recap: Apple is the No. 4 mobile phone maker in the world behind Nokia, Samsung and LG. Intel smartphones are on the way--again | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog. Intel is getting ready to make a long-belated entry into the smartphone market with a new-and-improved chip. But the usual questions linger. The most obvious ones are: Will it appear in a phone that is groundbreaking enough to entice buyers? And will this finally usher the world's largest chipmaker into one of the world's largest chip markets? The answers are hard to come by--Intel is saying little about the chip, due later this year, or about customers at this point--though the trends are clear. Market researcher IDC said in February that vendors shipped about 101 million smartphones during the fourth quarter of 2010, surpassing, for the first time, the 92 million PCs shipped during the same period. But Intel's reticence is understandable: it doesn't want to announce the chip without real phones in tow.
An LG phone that was preannounced two years ago never appeared. The description Intel currently provides of the chip is only about 30 words. Medfield-based phones are expected midyear. The smartphone is changing everything. The smartphone is changing everything. How we shop, how we organize our lives, how we spend our time, how we connect with people.
The smartphone is changing how businesses compete, changing the landscape of winners and losers across the consumer electronics, PC, Internet, media and telecom spaces. The smartphone is rearranging the technical architecture of the world, spreading it out, flattening it, impacting industries as diverse as paper and pulp, transportation, energy and gaming. Smartphone operating systems are branching out and up, becoming the primary interfaces through which we reach the Internet and blurring the lines between computers and everything else. Advertisement Within the next five years, 80 to 90 percent of US consumers will carry a smartphone, up from around 25 percent today. People love smartphones because they make our lives easier. These amazing devices are doing more while costing less.
Remember when Internet time felt fast? New Research Shows Smartphones To Outsell PCs By 2012 - MentorMate Company Blog. Queen of the Net Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker stole the show last week with her “State of the Web” presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Crowned “The Queen of the Net” in 1998 by Barron’s Magazine, Meeker started covering the nascent tech sector in the mid-eighties as an analyst with Solomon Brothers. Throughout the years, she has published a long list of research reports and leading insights into the future of technology -- most notably, a 322 page tome titled “The Internet Report” Co-authored with Chris DePuy in 1995. Successful stocks Meeker championed early on included Dell, Microsoft, Intuit, Netscape, AOL, Amazon.com, Yahoo! , eBay and Google. Failed picks included AOL after its takeover of Time Warner, Excite@Home and drugstore.com.
In 2004, Morgan Stanley (with Meeker as research analyst) served as lead manager for the initial public offering of Google. The land grab for Internet access Slide #10 suggests that Smartphones will pass PCs in 2012. More Smartphones Than Desktop PCs by 2011 - PCWorld. Smartphone sales will surpass worldwide PC sales by the end of 2011, says a report. The report, by RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, estimates that by that time shipments of both will be approaching 400 million a year. Smartphone sales are on the increase, with standard mobile sales decreasing - and that is pushing PC giants such as Apple, Dell, Acer and Microsoft into the lucrative arena. Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 286.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a 6.1 percent decrease from the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner.
However, smartphone sales surpassed 40 million units, a 27 percent increase from the same period last year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market. "Given the higher margins, smartphones offer the biggest opportunity for manufacturers. Apple is picking up particular praise from analysts, concerning its iPhone smartphone strategy.
Microsoft Windows Phone 7 hits 1.5 million in sales to retailers. The phone that's supposed to save us from our phones has sold 1.5 million units to carriers and retailers in the first six weeks, according to the Microsoft News Center. Achim Berg, the vice president of business and marketing for Windows phones, said he knows the company faces stiff competition in the smartphone game. "We're in the race. It's not a sprint, but we are certainly gaining momentum and we're in it for the long run," he said. The Windows Phone 7 went on sale on in the United States on Nov. 8. In other sales news, Apple TV and Roku are racing to sell 1 million units of their set-top boxes. Cell phone chip markets and ranking. Mary Meeker: Smartphones Will Surpass PC Shipments In Two Years. Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit, Mary Meeker gives a ten-minute slideshow packed with great data showing the monetum and direction of different Internet trends.
This year, a big focus of her presentation was on mobile. Specifically, she put up the slide above showing a Morgan Stanley estimate that global smartphone shipments will eclipse PC shipments in 2012, with more than 400 million smartphones expected to be shipped that year, compared to less than 200 million last year. This prediction is reasonable. Smartphones are cheaper and phones, in general, are more ubiquitous. If you look at only Apple iOS devices (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad), they have ramped up faster than any other technology, including AOL and Netscape in the early days or NTT Docomo’s imode mobile Web phones a decade ago. Add Android in there and combined with Apple’s iOS, those two platforms now account for 42 percent of smartphone operating systems shipped in the third quarter of 2010.