Validity of New Feature Phone Market

Do hardware vendors even want to play in the low-cost market?
Junko Yoshida, EETimes
2/27/2014 08:40 PM EST

What once looked like a sky's-the-limit market for smartphones has been grounded.

If this week's Mobile World Congress gave us any clue, low-cost mobile handsets are back in the spotlight. The battle over smartphones loaded with bells and whistles is fading. A new skirmish is emerging in the segment that used to be called feature phones. If anyone assumed that the industry's pundits and market research companies abandoned hope for feature phones a few years ago, well, not so fast.

"The real significance" of the market for phones priced below $50 "is the validity of the addressable sub-today's-smartphone market," John Jackson, program vice president for mobility research at IDC, told us. "The precise size is debatable, but it'll be in the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions."

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