Apple has yet to announce any new smartphones this year, but rumours are starting to pile up around the topic of the next iPhone. The smartphone will be an incremental upgrade from the iPhone 5 and come with a low-cost alternative.
Both smartphones will either be launched at Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC or at a separate conference for the iPhone and other devices. We expect the phone to come no later than August.
While the high end smartphone market seems to be slowing in pace, there is a huge new market for low end smartphones, now that feature phones are starting to become less used.
Apple could tap into that market and already does with older versions of the iPhone. iPhone 4 and 4S sales did very well this past year in developing countries, because of the price drop.
With a new low end smartphone, we expect the rate of success for Apple will be much higher. Emerging markets are currently going wild for cheap smartphones and if there is an Apple device in the market they will snap that up.
ABI Research reports the low and mid range smartphone market is set to explode in the next few years, with 635 million in 2013 to 925 million units in 2018.
This will be 46% of the smartphone market with low or mid range smartphones and with companies like Google trying to make affordable off-contract smartphones with high-tier specs, we may see more moves for affordable smartphones.
Apple can make big steps, but only if they change their ideals from the one smartphone per year to two or three tiers of smartphones. One is cheaper, inexpensive and without a contract, the second is mid range and the third is high tier.
Cupertino may miss out on this opportunity and we know Samsung, HTC, Nokia and Google will be all over the market.
