Devices get smart

The flurry of smartphone releases continued unabated throughout 2009, despite a slow start to the year given near-empty hands in the Android camp during February's GSMA Mobile World Congress and ongoing delays from Microsoft to Windows Mobile 7. While 2008 saw an initial rush of vendors filling touchscreen-sized holes in their portfolios to match Apple's initial momentum, 2009 saw a more measured approach alongside maturing platforms as well as the rebirth of an old friend, Palm.

If we already thought the 'smart' device market was confusing, 2009 only served to fragment its divisions. As rumoured, PC manufacturers such as Acer, Asustek and Dell moved into the sector in their masses, bringing handsets as well as a plethora of netbooks, lapped up by operators as ubiquitous-networking devices. Given the initial momentum behind netbooks, even Nokia answered long-running speculation by launching its Booklet netbook as part of its play to diversify (in contradiction to its strategy to halve its smartphone offerings in 2010). Downsizing further still was Qualcomm, which in June announced the 'smartbook,' a category we see amalgamating with netbooks and laptops, particularly if the use-case for the former two can't displace that of a laptop for daily use.

In 2010 we see the inevitable (and continuing) push of the smart device down into the low-cost domain of mid-range and, particularly, prepaid devices. The smartphone category in particular will become more fragmented than ever and we expect to see traditional enterprise smartphone features dropped in lieu of differentiating consumer smartphones by their respective application stores. The shift will, however, bring good news for mid-range volumes, which have suffered this year in light of consumers opting for more powerful devices.

In terms of internals, we expect existing high-performance architectures to be pushed across smart gadgets (evident, for example, in the range of devices planned on Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform) and equally, more affordable, architectures of similar capability to drive low-cost smartphone volumes. For software, we expect more platforms to expand into non-cellular devices such as the iPod Touch, but which benefit from the application ecosystem of the OS - steps into which are just becoming evident on Android.

(This article is part of a series of predictions for 2010 from the GSMA Intelligence team.)