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Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Slip For First Time Ever

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 26 2018, @07:15AM   
from the slippery-slope dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The global smartphone market is shrinking for the first time as choosey buyers in emerging markets hang on to their mobiles for longer.

In Gartner's Q4 sales stats, Samsung maintained a narrow lead in global volume shipments of smartphones – but every major (top five) vendor outside of those based in China saw unit shipments slip.

Some 407.84 million handsets found a new home in the quarter, equating to a 5.6 per cent slide or 24.29 million fewer phones sold than the prior year.

Several major factors caused the market shrinkage, said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. "First, upgrades from feature phones to smartphones have slowed right down due to a lack of quality 'ultra-low-cost' smartphones and users preferring to buy quality feature phones.

"Second, replacement smartphone users are choosing quality models and keeping them longer, lengthening the replacement cycle of smartphones. Moreover, while demand for high quality, 4G connectivity and better camera features remained strong, high expectations and few incremental benefits during replacement weakened smartphone sales," Gupta added.

This is a characteristic of the emerging markets, where all the action is – not mature markets like the UK or USA.

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Original Submission

• upgrades upgrades (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday February 26 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)

  by VLM (445) on Monday February 26 2018, @01:37PM (#643908)

  A topic no one has mentioned yet is software upgrades and the likely impact on this issue.

  Google is the best in the business AFAIK and I currently use google FI and a two year old Nexus 6P and google promises OS upgrades for only 2 years and security patches for only 3 years. So my nearly two year old 6P is nearing its enforced obsolescence death date. Other mfgrs do things like no upgrades or security patches ... ever at all.

  You never really "own" a closed source cell phone. You're just paying up front for use for a couple months until Big Brother decides you'll buy another by stopping upgrades. I'm not "really" paying $30/month for goog fi plus a phone, I'm paying $30/month for service and $25/month to replace my phone every two years or so I'm not sure pay as you go actually saves money. For feature phones, certainly, for smart phones probably not.

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• Re:upgrades (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:40PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:40PM (#644217)

  Nexus 6P. Google and Huawei have not totally locked that device down, so it is perfectly possible to install any number of third-party firmware bundles when Google eventually stops making official firmware updates for it. The big problem is that stupid built-in battery. I lucked out this time because the official Huawei service centre here still had one fresh battery pack which they installed in my phone (an involved procedure from what I can see!) for a small fee after my original battery could barely keep half of its rated charge, and it would run out of juice after less than a day. That came at a time when I could ill afford to buy a new phone, and it was touch and go for a time, because someone else had already reserved it, but luckily for me they changed their mind. Yay for Apple making non-user replaceable batteries a thing! Now, with any luck, my 6P will keep trucking for at least another 12-18 months, if not longer, by which time it may actually make sense to buy a new phone.

  Parent