The low-cost smartphones costing less than $150 present a strong growth opportunity for the mobile phone industry, according to the new NPD DisplaySearch Smartphones: Displays, Designs and Functionality report. These devices are forecast to double every year from 2010 to 2016, increasing from 4.5 to 311 million.
As you would expect, 60% of the demand is from the Asia Pacific region, where a large majority of component suppliers and manufacturing factories are located, providing both time and cost savings. These solutions have a shorter lifetime than high-end smartphones and are manufactured using ready-made solutions from application processor manufacturers.
The research company suggests that Android is the most popular operating system for low-cost smartphone designs because it is open source. Brands and manufactures tend to use mature, low-price components, rather than developing new ones.
NPD DisplaySearch forecasts that the share of low-cost smartphones will grow from 2% of total smartphone shipments in 2012 to 29% in 2016, with local brands and “white box” vendors in China taking an aggressive stance in capturing market share…