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Daniel Shen, Taipei; Willie Teng, DIGITIMES [Friday 25 March 2011]
With the rise of smartphones, feature phones, in addition to pricing, will have to place more emphasis on social networking features such as hot keys linking to popular social network sites and QWERTY keyboards, according to Taiwan-based handset manufacturers.
Smartphones have quickly grown from a niche product to the industry mainstream in many markets, and in 3-5 years global sales of smartphones will overtake that of feature phones, the manufacturers pointed out, noting that smartphone prices are coming down fast as well.
The handset makers are currently looking for new selling points for feature phones and believe they have found one in social networking. In addition to existing features such as text messaging and multi-media capability, future feature phones will better integrate e-mail, instant messaging and social networking, the makers said. QWERTY keypads are important, but the phones do not necessarily have to support 3G and 4G connections.
Take Facebook for example, the social network is widely downloaded and pre-loaded into both smartphones and feature phones. Over 2,500 mobile devices already support Facebook functions.
Facebook recently acquired Israel-based Snaptu, which is a company designing applications for feature phones. While most companies are designing apps for Android and iOS smartphones, the feature phone segment could become a new opportunity, some software designers indicated.
Such social networking feature phones will be especially popular in emerging markets, where most people still cannot afford nor need a powerful smartphone. A reasonably priced device that allows enhanced communication methods with friends and family is perhaps just what they desire, the handset makers said.
Models with messaging as the main focus will account for a third of the feature phone market in 2015, according to ABI Research. Though smartphones clearly grabbed the spotlight in 2010, feature phones still claimed a 75% share of the global handset market, ABI said.
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