Whats the Next Dominant User Device?

Figures produced by Statista show global sales of Smart Phones since 2007 following the pattern of a classical S curve and plateauing last year (2017) at around 1.5 Billion units per year. 

If one considers that the average person will replace his or her device every 3 years or so (if they ignore their service provider trying to lock them into a replace every 2 years cycle), then it suggests that the market is saturated.

Indeed, Canalys's figures suggest that smart phone shipments in China dropped last year, especially at the upper end of the market. This reinforces the recent news that Apple is not shipping as many of its new iPhone X models as anticipated.

So where is the attention of consumers going and does this signify a new battleground for consumer devices and internet access?

Tablets are certainly not taking over. Last year's figures indicated a 20% global drop on sales by the top 5 vendors to around 200M units p.a. continuing a slip which appears to go back to 2014. In fact, Statista's figures for combined PC, Laptop and Tablet sales show significnat declines and are not forecast to increase either, suggesting combined sales of around 400 million p.a. which is still dwarfed by Smart Phones.

Figures for wearable technologies, smart watches, smart glasses, rings etc. are growing but are only at around 100 Million units p.a.

Smart speakers, such as Alexa and Google Assistant, do not appear to be the answer either. Although fast growing and central to the home automation market, Canalys puts 2018 global sales projections at only around 56M and to be honest smart digital assistants are already available on smart phone platforms.

Firesticks can be discounted too. They are really only focused on smart TVs and too niche to shoulder the whole burden.

Augmented reality glasses or mixed reality smart glasses are still kick starting after Googles original concept fired the imagination but failed in public. Google is back again with a refined, less clunky version, but so are a slew of other contenders: Microsoft with its Hololens (holographic, gesture driven windows 10), Vuzix with the Blade and Alexa integration, Lightwear and Meta 2 just to name a few. However global sales are yet to reach the 1 million units p.a. mark.

So where is the market going and who is going to capitalise on it? this is an interesting question as it implies the next dominant driver of digital technology exploitation as well as which companies will profit.

Although IoT will end up connecting billions more devices than consumer devices, the influence is likely to be lesser as there is less money to be made there. 1nce for example, is targeting a price point of 10 Euros per device for 10 years connectivity support. As the economics don't support higher prices. Sparce data is the name of the game, not high end functions and complex data sets.

Human Computer integration is coming, but not yet here. Again this is interesting as it appears to be catching up rapidly with wearables, so there may be some imminent convergence over the next 4 years or so.

So is fragmentation into niche applications slowing growth, or is this a pause before the next integrating concept comes along and what will it look like?