Telecom Lead Asia: Global sales of handsets featuring
Near Field Communication (NFC) increased ten-fold in 2011 to 30 million units.
Berg Insight said shipments are forecast to reach 700
million units in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 87.8 percent.
NFC phone sales will touch 100 million in 2012
Recently, Berg Insight said close to 100 million
cellphones using NFC technology will be sold in 2012, with sales more than
tripling from a year ago. NXP Semiconductor is the leading manufacturer of NFC
chips.
Last year more than 40 NFC-enabled models were released
by the handset vendors, in order to tap emerging market for mobile payments.
Berg Insight further expects the global market for NFC phones to grow to 700
million phones in 2016 from 30 million in 2011.
Periodic calibrations using satellite and wireless
network signals are necessary to compensate for the low data accuracy and high
drift obtained from low cost sensors used in handsets today. The NFC technology
for short-range wireless point-to-point communication reached a breakthrough in
2011 when several leading handset vendors released more than 40 NFC-enabled
handsets.
The increase in smartphone adoption is driving higher
attach rates for other wireless connectivity technologies in handsets including
GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN. These connectivity technologies are already a standard
feature on high-end smartphones and most medium- and low-end models.
Declining costs will also enable integration in the
featurephone segment that is gaining smartphone-like functionality. The attach
rate for GPS among GSM/WCDMA/LTE handsets reached 31 percent in 2011 and grew
to 38 percent for all air interface standards.
Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets have doubled annually
in the past four years and the attach rate increased to 33 percent in 2011.
WLAN connectivity in handsets enables a range of use cases including offloading
data traffic from increasingly congested mobile networks, media synchronization
and indoor navigation services.
Reliable indoor navigation systems for handsets need
hybrid location technologies that fuse signal measurements from multiple
satellite systems like GPS and GLONASS with cellular and WLAN network signals,
together with data from sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses
and altimeters, said Andra Malm, senior analyst, Berg Insight.
editor@telecomlead.com