Research firm ARC Group predicts that as smartphone sales rise so will Bluetooth, while Wi-Fi "phones" will lag behind considerably.
A new study by research firm ARC Group says that Bluetooth phone shipments will rise to nearly 87.5 million units by 2009, while Wi-Fi capable phones will only grab 15% of the market.
Bluetooth is currently most popular in European-targeted smartphones and mobile phones, with North America lagging behind in Bluetooth interest and Asia/Pacific being even less interested at the moment, with the notable exception of Japan. Nonetheless, Bluetooth shipments in 2003 were 2 million units and ARC expects 2004 sales of Bluetooth phones to top out at 6 million units. At that rate, ARC expects that 70% of mobile phones in 2009 to ship with Bluetooth, or 87.5 million units.
The future for the other big wireless standard, Wi-Fi, is less rosy. Currently requiring larger, more expensive devices and substantially more power, wireless LAN technologies also have roaming problems issues that made VoIP-over-Wi-Fi to WAN network (GSM, CDMA, etc.) handoff very difficult. For now Wi-Fi is limited to certain models of communicator, and even then Wi-Fi is not a particularly common feature, as the combined radio chipsets required are non-trivial.
There are signs of growth for handset Wi-Fi, particularly in North America. Microsoft and Intel in particular are pushing Wi-Fi, as Microsoft has already added Wi-Fi support to the base version of its Windows Mobile OS and Intel's XScale processors, widely used by mobile devices, have a built-in Wi-Fi interface on-chip. Nonetheless, ARC Group predicts that by 2005 Wi-Fi mobile devices will reach only 1.27 million units shipped for the year. After 2005, however, ARC believes sales will pick up a bit to reach 18.75 million units by 2009. That will still be only 15% of the total smartphone and communicator market, however. As a result, tri-wireless devices supporting WAN, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi are likely to remain a rare niche market.
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