Total worldwide smartphone shipments surpassed 101.2 million in the fourth quarter, up 89 percent year-over-year. Canalys adds that smartphone shipments for the year fell just shy of 300 million units. The U.S. remains the largest international market in terms of smartphone shipments, more than doubling the Chinese market. Android led the U.S. market in Q4 2010, with shipments of 12.1 million units–almost triple the number of BlackBerry devices.
Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities are a desired feature among both traditional mobile phone and smartphone users. More than one-third (35%) of traditional mobile phone owners say they want GPS features on their next handset purchase, while 15 percent of smartphone owners say they want GPS says JD Powers.
Further supporting these trend details, a Deloitte; www.deloitte.com, survey finds smartphone apps, e-readers, and tablets are “transforming” consumer behavior. In fact, the report—entitled “Revolutions 2010”—suggests smartphone/tablet owners are relying less on traditional consumer-electronics devices such as MP3 players, handheld video games, and GPS PND units for their media, entertainment, and location information needs. Rather, these consumers are turning to apps. De La Salle Institute in Chicago is the latest school to take up the Tablet PC in the classroom. Students will lease the tablets for $56 monthly over a 46 month period, so clearly, this school has their sights set on Tablet PC adoption for the full high-school experience.
By linking publisher content with GPS, app developers can tap into location and create more locally relevant versions of their sites or provide locally relevant information without requiring the user to enter location. Moreover, the larger screens of the tablets afford the user with mobile readability of robust active content.
How big a shift will these devices make on our culture — Forrester, an independent technology and market research company, has released a new tablet PC consumer market forecast, which predicts explosive sales growth over the next five years.
According to the data, tablet sales will more than double in 2011 from 10.3 million units sold to 24.1 million units. In 2012, the numbers could reach as high as 35.1 million units sold. The Forrester data suggests that by 2015, tablet sales could reach 44 million units, and that the number of tablet users could be as high as 82.1 million. Given the historically high rate of app downloads and usage by tablet owners it is easy to predict the impact geo location will have on content…just look at Google’s $6 billion acquisition offer last month that Groupon recently turned down. From that perspective, who, what, where and when will define a significant volume of new smart device accessible content.
To encircle these shifts in publishing and commerce, we will see consumers and workers using these devices to share private and corporate information with each other and use the intrinsic GPS technology with people locater apps from GTX Corp and LOCiMOBILE to answer the “where is” question and make those connections in real time.
Tags: better people finder, family tracking, GPS Navigation, GPS Tracking, GPS Tracking Apps, gpVector, GTX Corp, GTXCorp, GTXO, Social Networking, where is question
Published by admin on Feb 1, 2011 under 3G Smart Phones,4G Smartphones,APP Store,GPS Tracking,GPS Tracking Devices,Global Positioning Systems,Location Based Services,Mobile Phones,Social Networking | Post your comment now
