Smartphones have revolutionized the market for portable devices since they first came out some five years ago. In the UK alone, an estimated 22million people plan to buy a new mobile device in the next year.Present numbers state that nearly 53% of the UK’s 60m inhabitants have a smartphone
The rest use feature phones and it is doubtful whether they are going to shift to smartphones in the near future.
A problem the manufacturers are facing is the number of people using smartphones is starting to decrease. In order to reach new customers, manufacturers have to convince people who already have a smartphone to either upgrade to a newer model or to steal customers from their competitors. These opportunities prove it is much more difficult to persuade people who are currently using a feature phone to upgrade to a smartphone.
Tradition kept alive: landline phones
Despite of all the talk and the rapidly growing market of smartphones and feature phones, landline phones do not only still exist but also sell surprisingly well.
While traditionalists do appreciate old telephones with cords, most people who do still use landline phones prefer digital cordless phones. Those do have a slick design but other than that are nothing but phones, contrary to feature phones and smartphones which contain lots of other features. A lot of people look for stylish phones on Gigaset.com The vast majority of them own either a feature phone or a smartphone along with a landline phone. Whereas the former ones are being used on the go and for several purposes, the latter is solely used for phoning.
Some of the newer models do in fact look like smartphones and even use touchscreen functionality but do not contain any of the other features a smartphone can offer. They can be regarded as a kind of hybrid.