Market Research specialist GfK has said that in sales for June 2008, £1m of Mobile speakers have been sold – compared with just £146,000 in May 2007! In a related stat, handsets with MP3 players and/or FM Radios now account for 65% of the market, which has increased from 44% last year.
This research dovetails in nicely with the launch of Nokia’s “Comes with Music” and Vodafone’s unlimited music service, powered by Omnifone – clearly, if you are going to download the tracks you are going to play them – and that’s either going to be via headphones, or speakers (it’s just a shame that a percentage of the music-dowloading populous choose to blare tracks out of their mobile device internal speaker, typically whilst walking along!)
Obviously device feature-sets have been growing too, with more storage possible on-device (either internally, or on memory card), higher-spec “player” apps, and in some cases, specialised audio circuitry.
The research provided by GfK shows that the average price of speakers was doubling since last year, which could mean a lot of things – I’d like to think it means consumers were/are paying more for higher fidelity and power output. However, bundling speakers with handset is a very cheap and popular way for end-users to get the hardware.
As digi-downloads grow exponentially, expect to see much more of this kind of news – actually scratch that… you won’t see it, you’ll hear about it!
[Via: Mobile Today]