The market research group says 19 million ULC handsets will ship this year, with Motorola continuing to dominate the sector with an almost 80 percent share.

Chris Ambrosio, Director of the Wireless Device Strategies at the Strategy Analytics said: "In addition to Texas Instruments and Infineon, other chipmakers, including Freescale, Qualcomm and Philips (now NXP) have rapidly made single chip solutions available. These new products will meet the dual needs of driving new subscriber growth in emerging markets and creating a stronger profit opportunity in entry-tier segments for small handset vendors."

Though interest from operators in the targeted developing counties appears quite low, the researchers suggest Push-to-Talk (PTT) could potentially be one of the applications to drive subscriber growth in the medium term.

Ambrosio also expects color, FM radio and speaker phone versions to become common features in these low cost handsets by 2011.

The GSM Association kick-started the effort to develop Ultra Low Cost handsets targeted at emerging countries that would sell initially at a sub $40 cost price at the 2005 3GSM Congress in Cannes.

Motorola launched the first such phone at the Congress, which the GSMA said would be the first step towards a sub $30 handset target.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved