I generally focus on the smartphone market here on ZDNet because that is what I use and what most readers seem to be interested in. However, the feature phone market is still relevant with staggering global figures that show over 70% of phones sold in 2011 were actually feature phones. Many, including myself, seemed to shrug off the Nokia World Asha Series 40 handset announcements, but according to this Forbes article feature phones are now more profitable than smartphones so it looks like Nokia’s strategy of staying in the feature phone business may turn out to be a very smart move.
Many manufacturers that made feature phones in the past, including Motorola, Sony, HTC, and LG, have focused their efforts on the smartphone market. While Nokia is focusing on the smartphone market with Windows Phone, they are also very actively targeting the “next billion” with excellent devices like the Asha lineup that includes the Asha 303 and Asha 201. Nokia actually passed the 1.5 billion level this month and looks to rule this market in the future.
There is a report from Visiongain that discusses the low cost mobile phone market in detail.
Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since.
Disclosure
Matthew Miller
Matthew is a professional naval architect by day and a mobile gadget freak at all other times. He purchases his own devices and then sells them on eBay or Craigslist to buy more. Many other devices are sent for review on a 30-day loaner basis and then returned to the carrier or manufacturer. If any are provided as “long term loaner units” this will be clearly disclosed in his reviews.
Biography
Matthew Miller
Matthew Miller started using a mobile devices in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since. He is a co-host with GigaOM's Kevin Tofel on the MobileTechRoundup podcast and an author of three Wiley Companion series books. Matthew started using mobile devices with a US Robotics Pilot 1000 and has owned over 125 different devices running Palm, Linux, Symbian, Newton, BlackBerry, iOS, Android, webOS, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone operating systems. His current collection includes an HTC Radar 4G, Dell Venue Pro, Apple iPad 2, HTC Flyer, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nokia N9, Apple iPhone 4S, MacBook Pro, and many more, along with tons of accessories and classic devices like the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 and Sony CLIE UX50. Matthew can be found on various discussion forums under the user name of "palmsolo".
I generally focus on the smartphone market here on ZDNet because that is what I use and what most readers seem to be interested in. However, the feature phone market is still relevant with staggering global figures that show over 70% of phones sold in 2011 were actually feature phones. Many, including myself, seemed to shrug off the Nokia World Asha Series 40 handset announcements, but according to this Forbes article feature phones are now more profitable than smartphones so it looks like Nokia’s strategy of staying in the feature phone business may turn out to be a very smart move.
