James Delahunty
19 Apr 2009 9:35
Samsung Mobile Display, a joint venture between Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDI, has revealed on Sunday that it expects the global smartphone market to balloon from 170 million in 2009 to 500 million units in 2012. Feature-packed phones such as Apple's iPhone and Blackberry handsets have seen sales continue to pick up while the mobile phone market overall has seen drops in handset sales.
According to the Samsung Mobile Display statement, smartphones will make up 29 percent of the industry by 2012, compared to 14 percent in 2009. The display maker also expected touch-screens to increase in popularity and be used with mobile phones, digital cameras, navigation devices and digital media players, predicting that 50% of the devices produced in the areas in 2013 would use touch-screen technology.
Sales of Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays will take off over the coming years as they are thinner and provide better picture quality, but currently with a trade-off of a shorter life-span and high cost of production, compared to its alternatives. Samsung Mobile Display predicts OLED will be used with 50 percent of all mobile phones over the next five years.