This year, the first $50 smartphone will appear in emerging countries.
This is according to a prediction by analyst firm, Gartner, in a recent report, which notes that mobility has always been a separate topic for IT professionals, but is now influencing mainstream strategies and tactics in the wider areas of technology enablement and enterprise architectures.
In the report, Gartner says with the arrival of the $50 smartphone, the world is poised to use smartphones for far more than just phone calls.
It adds that the phone will be an essential element to banking and other core services that will modernise many economies.
In its quarterly mobile phone tracker for the fourth quarter of 2012, IDC says manufacturers of lower-cost smartphones are finding their footing in the market.
Mark Hung, research director at Gartner, says new entrants in the smartphone market, including Chinese brands and white-box handset makers, have served to drive down the cost curve.
"A new competitive landscape has created increasing pricing pressures in the smartphone market. Huawei and ZTE are putting pressure on the established brands in the developed markets," he explains.
"In the domestic Chinese market, Lenovo is gaining market share by being a price leader. In the first half of 2012, Lenovo had the fastest growth in the smartphone market among the three companies (albeit from a smaller base), selling more than 6.8 million smartphones," he adds.
Hung also points out that Huawei and ZTE cannot easily discount Lenovo's pricing strategy, because, unlike smaller white-box vendors, Lenovo is an established brand in China. This, in turn, has led to a steeper price curve decline in China, he notes.
The Gartner report also states that some of the must-have features in a traditional smartphone platform can be eliminated for emerging economies.
In developed countries, it says, the emergence of smartphones has encroached on the turf of many other mobile consumer electronics devices (such as cameras, personal navigation devices, PCs, MP3 players, etc).
However, it says, in emerging economies, some of these functions are not as important; in particular, navigation and Internet access have lower priority.
"For the former, because fewer people drive a car in emerging markets, the navigation feature (versus the trade-off in battery life) becomes less important. For the latter, while checking e-mails and browsing the Web are nice-to-have features, the commensurate increase in monthly cellular charges makes them financially undesirable."
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