Trends for 2012: Connected Devices

The team at Pyramid Research , part of the Light Reading Communications Network, has looked ahead to 2012 to identify the key trends they expect to see in the coming year. Follow the "Trends for 2012" series of articles to build up a picture of what's coming down the pipe in the next 12 months.

Tablet sales will expand as prices fall and focus shifts to markets outside North America
Early challengers to Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)’s iPad have had mixed results, but we expect that new, lower-priced devices such as Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)’s sub-$200 tablet will usher in a new era of growth in the tablet space and make tablet growth accelerate in areas outside of North America.

NFC-enabled mobile phones will see more significant uptake than we expected in 2011
Mobile service providers were slow to realize their commitment to NFC-enabled services expressed at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. Propelled by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)’s aggressive entry into the mobile payments market with Google Wallet service (launched in 2011 in the U.S. and expected to launch in Western Europe in 2012), a number of large MNOs have taken concrete steps to launch commercial NFC services for their customers in 2012. This, as well as the readiness of vendors to produce NFC-enabled handsets, will result in the quadrupling of sales of NFC-enabled smartphones in 2012, when they will exceed 80 million.

Approximately 70 percent of total handset sales and nearly half of smartphone sales in 2012 will come from emerging markets
The role of emerging markets such as China and India in the handset and smartphone arena will continue to grow, driven by the availability of less expensive device models.

Apple will start seeing declining market share (unit sales) in smartphones in 2012
The surging demand for inexpensive models, coupled with Apple’s commitment to high profit margins and the high-end market, will result in a market share drop of around 2 percentage points, after five successive years of expansion.

For more

• Industry Insight Services on Mobile Broadband Devices: Global Landscape & Trends
• Smartphone Operating Systems: Ecosystem analysis and trends shaping the future of the global smartphone market
• NFC-Enabled Smartphones to Account for 28% of Global Market by 2015
• Pyramid's Top 2012 Trends (free registration required)

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