According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, shipments of smartphones are forecast to reach 1.38 billion units in 2021, an increase of 7.7% over 2020. This trend is expected to continue into 2022 when year-over-year growth will be 3.8% with shipments totaling 1.43 billion. Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, with an increasing per capita disposable income and the increasing use of digital platforms amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Samsung Electronics retained the top spot in the global smartphone market; the world’s largest smartphone maker held a market share of 20 percent, followed by Apple with 14 percent, and Xiaomi with 13 percent, according to the report from Hong Kong-based market researcher Counterpoint Research.
The smartphone industry is among the fastest-growing industries with a large number of international players battling for market share with high competition. As the use of mobile devices has continued to grow around the world, people are using smartphones for everything from entertainment to social media and for professional use. Smartphones have also become the devices that people use to manage their productivity on the go. The level of demand for smartphones is likely to increase in the future based on how embedded the technology is in daily life. Smartphones are commonly chosen by consumers based on features like battery capacity, fast charging option, Random Access Memory (RAM) and Read-Only Memory (ROM), processor, camera, display, operating system, as well as their cost.
The factors that determine which smartphone brand dominates the market
Operating system: Smartphones with their own operating system which must be open source and blockchain compatible: Open source refers to the computer software or applications where the owners or copyright holders allow the users or third party to see, use and provide the right to modify the source code of the product. An Open-Source Operating System is the Operating System in which source code is visible, publicly available, and editable.
Most of the Android alternative operating systems failed to dethrone Google and Apple over the last decade, like Tizen, Firefox OS, and Blackberry 10. Samsung may be working towards replacing the Android operating system on its devices with Google’s long-awaited open-source operating system, Fuchsia OS. Huawei recently confirmed that the company will be releasing devices powered by HarmonyOS on the European market this year.
Smartphone with dapps support:
Huawei, Xiaomi, and BBK’s Oppo and Vivo have joined together under the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA) in what appears to be an attempt to challenge the international dominance of Google’s Play Store.
Huawei lost its license to offer Google’s apps, and services last year, including the Google Play Store. This was such a problem that Huawei decided against officially releasing its last flagship, the Mate 30, internationally. The company has also announced it’s working on its own operating system called Harmony OS, and it says it’s investing $1 billion to fund the development, user growth, and marketing of Huawei Mobile Services, its alternative to Google’s services. The Play Store provides a significant revenue stream for Google, which takes a 30 percent cut of any sales made through the store. While everyone has been focused on centralized applications, most have missed the most fascinating part of the blockchain. One of the things that blockchain enables is decentralized applications (Dapps). To understand how Dapps differ from conventional apps, consider an app that also has these traits: Can’t be shut down; No downtime; Are more secure against cyberattacks; Aren’t owned by anyone.
Research and development costs spent by smartphone brand :
Research and development is also critical source of competitive advantage in the smartphone industry. Samsung and Apple are among the leading R&D spenders in the smartphone industry. As the level of competition in the smartphone industry has grown, the scope for differentiation has also reduced. Technologies including AI, virtual reality, and machine learning technologies are the leading sources of differentiation in the industry. Smartphone brands maintain a heavy focus on technological innovation and continue to improve their product line.
Apple Inc. spent a record 21.91 billion U.S. dollars on research and development in its 2021 fiscal year, increasing by about three billion from its 2020 total. Samsung invested a total of 16.19 trillion won ($13.73 billion) in R&D in the January-September period, up 289 billion won from a year earlier, to mark its largest spending ever during the cited period, according to its quarterly business report.
Chipsets :
Samsung has announced a standalone turnkey security solution that secures cryptocurrency transactions on smartphones. The solution consists of a Secure Element (SE) chip S3FV9RR and “enhanced” software. It is designed to secure the booting process, isolated storage, and mobile-based payments. The new SE chip is certified with Common Criteria (CC) EAL 6+ security standard, which is used in applications with the most rigorous security requirements, namely e-passports, and cryptocurrency hardware wallets. It can thereby be used on any mobile device and will work independently from the device’s main processor.
Whether it is Samsung Exynos, Qualcomm Snapdragon, or Apple’s bionic chipsets. Every smartphone manufacturer is spending billions of dollars making their chipsets more powerful.
Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR):
Virtual reality and augmented reality have hit the mainstream and there are many display types used in smartphones: LCD, OLED, AMOLED, Super AMOLED to enhance the experience of users. Samsung and Apple are leading the race in the segment of display technology used in smartphones.
Smartphone, which supports online gaming and not support:
As crypto continues to grow its popularity around the world, many industries are incorporating new-age technologies into their core offerings, and online gaming is one such industry. It has become a breeding ground for gaming developers to leverage the capabilities of cryptocurrency and get into NFT gaming.
NFTs started gaining attention in the world of art, music, and trading cards. Quite rapidly, online gaming based on Blockchain technology started capitalizing on the potential of NFTs.
Traditionally, the gaming formats were based on free-to-play, play-to-win, and pay-to-play models where the purchased items and paid upgrades in the game offered no real-economic return.
With the integration of Blockchain technologies, developers started to monetize games in the most disruptive ways offering users an opportunity to gain financial returns for their gaming skills and time invested. Gaming developers emphasize monetizing the game in two ways – trading NFTs or earning in-game rewards or cryptocurrencies. Instead of making a purchase that does not guarantee any economic return to players, they invest in NFT characters.
These tokens can be further sold to other players or on cryptocurrency marketplaces to create an internal economy. Currently, the mobile gaming market stands at around $1.5 billion (in revenue) but it is expected to touch $5 billion by 2025.
We have all witnessed the evolution of mobile computing technology over the past decade, but probably don’t fully appreciate how much it has boosted our work productivity.
Apple will win when it comes to platform privacy and security, since (iOS) is completely proprietary, while the other is built on an open-source core (Android). Apple’s track record and the fact that it does not keep any logs or information pertaining to its users bodes well for its privacy efforts. As for Google, it wants to collect as much data as possible about us. Google is a data and advertising company at its core. On the Play Store, there are a lot of malware exploits and bad actors.
With Samsung Galaxy smartphones, blockchain users can now manage and trade virtual assets from third-party wallets.
Users can import virtual assets stored on hardware wallets to access transactions on the blockchain. Samsung’s blockchain wallet supports cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, ERC20 tokens, Tron, and TRC20 tokens. With Samsung’s new smart TV lineup with integrated NFT-support, users can browse, buy, sell, and display digital assets via a personalized platform based on blockchain, Samsung Galaxy users can use decentralized apps to authenticate digital assets exchange. By embracing, developing, and delivering this technology early, Samsung is showing why it is the market leader in this segment.
It is expected that the brand which has an open-source operating system with dapps support and a top-tier developer base will prove to be the market leader in the space. It will be the first brand to integrate blockchain technology in its phone that enhances the security and privacy of a user’s assets, and will in the future help protect a customer’s data and identity.
