Mobile Broadband Consumer Electronics To Grow In 2008

Consumer electronics increasingly will include Wi-Fi for connectivity within the home and to the internet, with Wi-Fi:enabled portable consumer electronics devices proving a bridge to mobile consumer electronics devices.

Service providers will offer services to these devices in addition to handsets and laptops, according to ABI.

Phil Solis, principal analyst for ABI Research, said: “The market for cellular-enabled consumer electronics devices will gather momentum in 2008 and 2009 with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform.

“As mobile WiMAX networks increase their coverage, more WiMAX-only devices will be sold. And between WiMAX network deployments and devices using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform or Freescale’s MXC platform, the 2008-to-2009 time period will be critical for the development of this market.”

Solis continued: “Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform should reduce dramatically the cost of including cellular connectivity in consumer electronics devices by bundling wide-area connectivity with short-range wireless technologies and a multimedia processor. Even so, this market is dealing with consumer electronics manufacturers who feel that even the integration of Wi-Fi is nearly cost-prohibitive.”

“The benefits outweigh the additional costs, but the challenge for vendors is to sell consumers on those benefits.”

Recent research carried out by Point Topic and YouGov found that mobile network operators and device suppliers need to “cross the marketing chasm” if they are going to grow mobile internet into a big consumer market (see Mobile Internet Needs To Cross “Marketing Chasm”).

In other research, Strategy Analytics forecast that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion worldwide on mobile media this year, rising to $14.4 billion by 2011 (see Mobile Media Adspend To Increase).