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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 26 2018, @07:15AM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 26 2018, @06:43PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday February 26 2018, @06:43PM (#644083)

    > use cases where a touch screen is a disaster

    If you want to teach some colorful swear words to your children, put them next to my dad when he's forced to use a touch screen.

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