14 DAY TRIAL // The shipments of smartphones went up all around the world last year, and a new research report by Berg Insight seems meant to confirm that, pointing at a growth in shipment of smartphones of 74 percent during the last year, to a total of 295 million units.
Smartphone shipments are enjoying a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.4 percent, the report notes, adding that their number should reach 1,200 million units in 2015.
At the same time, the global user base for smartphones went up by 38 percent year-on-year, to around 470 million active users in 2010.
“In the next five years, the global user base of smartphones is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.9 percent to reach 2.8 billion in 2015,” Berg Insight notes.
Mobile phone makers and wireless carriers are focusing more and more on smartphones, and application developers too are showing more attention to these devices.
Moreover, users too are discovering the benefits of these devices, and seem to enjoy the fact that they can be used as personal computing devices to access the Internet and run applications, in addition to the voice and text services they support.
While high-end devices would usually make it to the headlines medium- and low-end smartphones are expecting to be those to drive the general growth of the segment upwards, the comapny notes.
“Chipset developers and handset vendors are working on technologies that will ensure a good user experience also for low cost smartphones”, said André Malm, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight.
“The challenge is to develop a handset with enough memory, graphics performance and processing power to run the operating system with multiple applications while ensuring a responsive system with fluid user interface and still keep costs down”.
According to André Malm, smartphones are to benefit greatly from advancements in chipset design.
Dual core and quad core applications, as well as graphics processors should bring important performance increases over the next five years or so.
With these new processors inside, smartphones would offer performance levels on par with those available in netbook computers or dedicated gaming consoles.
“At the same time, new user interfaces will be developed that make better use of sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes as well as cameras to detect movement or gestures without the need to touch the display,” he concludes.