The smartphone market will continue to boom this year as handset vendors roll out new, cheaper models and cut prices of the older phones — making them more attractive to a mass-market audience.
First Symbian smartphones with unsubsidized prices of 100 euros (US$137) will reach the market this year, the chief of the world’s most widely used smartphone platform told reporters in an interview at the Mobile World Congress trade show.
“This year we will see a few products hitting that point,” Lee Williams, head of the Symbian Foundation said.
The cheapest of Nokia’s Symbian phones now sells for 120 euros to 130 euros, without operator subsidies.
Component makers like Qualcomm and Infineon are expected to play a key role in enabling cheaper smartphones by driving down costs through manufacturing scale and technical innovation.
“Operators are crying out for lower-cost smartphones to reduce their subsidy burden and to seed the mass-market with more advanced data devices,” said Neil Mawston at analyst from Strategy Analytics.
“Lower-cost smartphones will drive up vendors’ shipments, but they will simultaneously push down average selling prices and profit margins,” he said.
Prices of smartphones are falling fast as cellphone vendors battle aggressively for a larger share of the more lucrative part of the handset market.
Top hardware makers plan to roll out increasingly cheaper smartphones this year to compete with new rivals. Operators see an opportunity to sell data packages to the fast-growing part of the market.
Earlier this month, Samsung unveiled a plan to treble smartphone shipments this year and promote its own bada software platform. Samsung said bada would expand the target market for smartphones significantly in emerging markets.
“Symbian is well placed to dominate the entry-level smartphone market because of its close ties with Nokia and a huge presence in emerging markets such as China,” Mawston said.
Separately, Google’s mobile operating system Android is now being used on 26 phone models and 60,000 phones using Android are sold every day, the US Internet giant’s chief executive said on Tuesday.
“There are 26 devices with 59 operators, in 48 countries, in 19 languages so far and it’s just the beginning,” Eric Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
“We are now shipping more than 60,000 Android devices ... per day and this number doubled over the last quarter,” he said.
“Obviously, the growth rate is accelerating and we hope that this growth rate will continue for very long time,” he added.
The Android operating system is featured in a number of phones including T-Mobile’s G1 and the Droid from Motorola in the US.
Although Android’s share of the US smartphone market is relatively small, it has doubled in the past year to 3.5 percent in October, recent data showed.
Meanwhile, US telecoms giant Verizon and Internet phone pioneer Skype said on Tuesday they had formed a strategic alliance to make Skype’s services available to Verizon’s smartphone users.
“Skype mobile on Verizon Wireless changes the game,” Verizon chief marketing director John Stratton said.
“For Verizon Wireless’ more than 90 million customers, Skype mobile adds great value because we’re effectively giving customers ... the option to extend their unlimited calling community to hundreds of millions of Skype users around the globe,” he said.
The two companies did not give financial details of the deal, which was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Skype bypasses the standard telephone network by sending voice and video calls over the Internet. It allows users to call others free of charge and provides the ability to connect with land lines or mobile devices at very low rates.
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