Samsung Galaxy Double over
CNBC
CNBC’s “Beyond The Valley ” caught up with people on the streets of London, Singapore and Guangzhou, China to ask what they soupon of foldable smartphones and the responses were not positive:
“It looks very strange,” according to a smartphone user in Guangzhou.
“It’s wonderful bulky,” said a user in Singapore.
“Phones are supposed to be for calling, for texting and for being connected with the world,” a drug in London said about her expectations for smartphones. “I don’t think that I really need to pay that much to have this because I can pay a lot but and still be satisfied.”
Market research firm International Data Corporation said that smartphone shipment sizes for the first quarter of 2019 fell 6.6% on-year after a 4.9% year-over-year decline in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Ben Wood, chief of enquiry at CCS Insight, explained that all smartphone makers face “one over-arching problem” at the moment — their devices look fetching much the same and they have similar functionality. When mobile phones first came out, there was tremendous modernization both in hardware and software, but that’s not now the case, according to Wood.
“The marginal gains over the different generation of offerings started to slow down,” he added.
Smartphone makers are also betting on super-fast internet as an incentive to get more people to swap their existing devices for new ones that can support the so-called 5G mobile internet.
South Korea’s three movable carriers as well as Verizon in the U.S. commercially launched their 5G services last month while other countries mould China and Japan are racing to launch their own versions of the nascent technology. Still, widespread adoption of 5G will subsume time since most of the infrastructure around the world is still being built.
But there’s some enthusiasm in the midst potential customers of 5G phones.
A user in Guangzhou said he would buy a 5G phone because it is “trendy” but it also has a “better internet plan” that would let him do more, including video streaming.
“It just makes everything easier for us, like social road, streaming Netflix and stuff,” another user in London said.