Low cost smartphones to hit market this year

A new blog post from Juniper Research predicts a variety of low-cost smartphones to hit the market this year, while Ovum states market leader Nokia is struggling to keep up with a high-end offering.

“Nokia has just announced plans to launch the first C-Series Smartphone, the Nokia C5, sometime during Q2 of this year. You may ask yourself, what is so special about this device? Well at just €135 [$A202], before taxes and subsidies, it has an impressive price point,” Patrick Fairlie from Juniper wrote.

“These low cost smartphones will inevitably cause a dent to high end feature phone sales…There is still plenty of growth left in the smartphone market and I believe that, as low cost smartphones begin to flood the market, the growth rate will only speed up.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Ovum’s Tim Renowden told ItWire the research group’s latest smartphone tracker for the 2009 year “demonstrates that smartphone manufacturers are embracing more powerful hardware capable of handling advanced graphics and video processing, with the transition from ARM11-based processors to ARM Cortex A8 and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets now seriously under way”.

Yet he went on to also say that “Nokia appears to be lagging behind the performance curve, with this tracker highlighting a specification gap opening between it and rivals…with only the niche N900 handset sporting a next-generation chipset”.