Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 08:07
Business IT -
Technology
Page 2 of 3
As manufacturers keep adding more functions and
applications and new services are offered on smartphones, Ovum says one
of those functions – GPS – and its widespread availability across all
of the major smartphone platforms, is great news for developers wishing
to deploy location-based applications and services, although so far few
developers have taken advantage of this beyond basic navigation
products.
Ovum also reveals that there’s much lower
penetration for TV-out capability, although Renowden says this was of
little surprise as it is only recently that most platforms have really
possessed the multimedia abilities required to justify its inclusion.
“Only the iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms produced devices
with TV-out, with Samsung in particular being proactive in supporting
the feature,” Renowden says, and he expects TV-out to grow in
popularity among media-centric smartphones, along with increasing
processing power and screen resolutions.
On the processor front, Ovum has found that most smartphones are
currently based on ARM11 architecture, but it expects some ARM Cortex
A8-based chipsets to appear in devices within the next update.
Renowden predicts platforms like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Nvidia’s
Tegra to emerge later in 2009 as manufacturers seek to add greater
multimedia functionality to devices, and he says devices based on the
ARM Cortex A9 multi-core architecture are expected in 2010.
According to Ovum, widgets are another buzzword in the industry, but
its tracker shows that only around 10% of smartphones support Internet
widget frameworks.
However, Renowden expects rapid growth in widget adoption through 2009/10.
As for the potential for rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks as
application platforms in mobile handsets, Ovum says its latest tracker
shows how little impact RIAs have so far made on smartphones.
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