Smartphones: faster at the top end, cheaper at the bottom

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 09:53

IT Industry - Market

Juniper Research sees a flood of low cost smartphones hitting the market this year; and at the top end Ovum says Nokia is lagging in the race to offer more processing power and performance.

Writing in a Juniper Research blog posting Patrick Fairlie says "Nokia has just announced plans to launch the first C-Series Smartphone, the Nokia C5, sometime during Q2 of this year. You may ask yourself, what is so special about this device? Well at just €135 [$A202], before taxes and subsidies, it has an impressive price point.

"Even though it does not have a large touchscreen...It does have a 3.2MP camera and a 2GB memory. Then when you add in social networking capabilities and Nokia's free Ovi Maps app, the C5 will surely tempt many users from their feature phone when it's time to upgrade."

Fairlie notes also that ST Ericsson has developed a platform for Android devices that it claims will enable manufacturers to produce smartphones with a wholesale price of less than €100 ($A150). He says: "We can expect a number of low cost smartphones to be launched. HTC have already announced the HTC Smart getting its launch in Q2."

He predicts that "These low cost smartphones will inevitably cause a dent to high end feature phone sales…There is still plenty of growth left in the smartphone market and I believe that, as low cost smartphones begin to flood the market, the growth rate will only speed up."

Meanwhile Ovum's Tim Renowden says that the research firm's latest Smartphone capability tracker, 1Q09–4Q09, "demonstrates that smartphone manufacturers are embracing more powerful hardware capable of handling advanced graphics and video processing, with the transition from ARM11-based processors to ARM Cortex A8 and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets now seriously under way."

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