It's already halfway through the official four-day schedule of CES 2015 trade show in Las Vegas, the US, and several analysts from our Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service are pounding the floors across the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) and adjacent hotels to check out the new trends and products, and also to directly have face-to-face meetings with many clients/prospects/journalists.
Our earlier blogs from Day 1 and Day 2 can be viewed here and here.
These are three key trends and appealing handset / smartphone models we have identified at the event on Day 3 (Weds):
1. Smartphones and Smartwatches to Control the Smart Home, Smart Car, IoT and Smart Everything: Smart Home and Smart Car are getting in force this year at CES 2015, with many concepts and products introduced by consumer electronics companies such as Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic and TCL, and car makers such as BMW, Toyota, Audi, Hyundai and Volkswagen, and chipset companies such as Qualcomm, nVidia and Intel. By manipulating a Samsung Gear S and LG G Watch R, drivers can park their cars automatically. Also smartphones can remotely send several wireless commands to smart home appliances such as washers, robot cleaners and refrigerators to control and monitor them. As machine-to-machine connectivity is becoming important in Smart Home, Car and IoT spaces, smartphones and smartwatches will play a crucial role to centrally manage these complicated systems. The smartphone is your "hub".
2. Microsoft to Revive the Feature Phone with Nokia Brand: It is very uncommon to see feature phones during the trade shows recently, but Microsoft unveiled the Nokia 215, which is known as one of the most affordable Internet-ready, entry-level phones yet. Nokia 215, a smartphone-like feature phone with popular apps and services such as Facebook, Twitter, Opera mini and Bing pre-installed, pictured below, is offering a battery time of up to almost a month in standby mode after just one charging session. Available only for US$29 retail, Microsoft will be sure to target emerging market such as APAC and African countries in which many people are still eager for even 2G connecitivity. Microsoft is not giving up on the feature phone segment and believe that there are three categories of customers to target with this kind of trusted, ultra-affordable feature phone: 1) 1st phone buyers, 2) feature phone loyalists and 3) people looking for a second phone that is smaller and less valuable.
3. Dual-Edge Bending Display To Be Available Soon: LG Display, one of the biggest smartphone display-panel providers, is showing its Active Bending display for selective customers in Las Vegas. This new prototype has a 6.0 inch Plastic OLED display that folds over the "two-sided" edges of the device, which is different from the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge with a one-sided bent display. It is speculated that Samsungis working on a dual-edge, curved Galaxy S6 at the moment, and it woudn't be a suprise ifXiaomi and LG would also release their new flagships equipped with this display in limited volume in 2015. The question is, how smartphone vendors are making the users want this innovative device, as there are arguably few practical or appealing users cases so far. So, if more useful use-cases are to be created with this sort of dual-edged display, we believe that this segment can create a huge market opportunity as consumers remain hungry for technological differentiators.
Please check back here, every day, to our blog page, for further blogs and daily updates from Las Vegas.
