LONDON — Smartphones will grow from around 10-percent of the total global handset market in 2007 to 31-percent of the market in 2013, according to a new study from ABI Research. The study’s authors predicated their prediction on a number of factors, including carriers’ drives to grow data revenues from advanced services and the general trend of pushing “smart” operating systems down into middle-tier devices.“Smart operating systems are continually being optimized to run on processors with lower performance,” ABI Research Vice President Stuart Carlaw said. “There is a strategic move to support smart OSes in single-chip midrange devices in order to unlock more data revenues.
“The market is currently dominated by Nokia (52-percent) and Symbian (65-percent),” he added. “However, the coalescence of the framework wars in the Linux environment and the growing stature of Windows Mobile will enable new competitors to put pressure on this established axis.”
That’s good news for content distributors. Smarphones are capable of interacting with a larger variety of content sources than their less-intelligent brethren, and a wider variety of third-party applications — to enable side-loading and media play, for example — are developed for phones of the smart variety.
The report’s authors spend a good deal of time discussing “the iPhone effect,” which they said is filtering through the handset market as other equipment manufacturers strive to remain competitive and consumers clamor for more usability. Features that probably will proliferate and become central to enhancing user interface experiences include touchscreens, touchpads and accelerometers that facilitate tilt and shock sensing, as well as haptics for tactile feedback, the report notes.
