Samsung will be making several announcements come Q1 2014. This will be mainly in the tablets segment. In recent reports, smartphone growth particularly in the high end has stagnated and the low end in most markets has also mainly converted to smartphones with there being more smartphones sold in the world than feature phones.
Next growth frontier for Samsung is tablets where Apple still leads in terms of both shipments and total ownership. Apple currently commands 29.6% tablets marketshare as of Q3 2013 with 14.1 million Q3 tablets shipments, Samsung comes second with 20.4% marketshare and 9.7 million Q3 shipments according to IDC. Samsung wants to reverse this as they did with smartphones. Market predictions are that there will be more tablets sold in 2014 than PCs, they want a huge chunk off that pie.
How do they do this?
Samsung will annonce atleast four tablets in Q1 2014, expectedly at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain.Samsung will have a huge presence at Barcelona with two separate events, one before and another during Mobile World Congress. The invites for both have already started going out with the Samsung Developer Conference slated for the 26th of February. I don’t expect announcements to be made at the dev conference but ways the devs can make the best of the newly announced devices then, the tablets.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite (SM-T111) which is expected to be the cheapest Samsung tablet with a price tag of EUR 100, 12.2 inch Galaxy Note tablet (SM-P900) among others could see the light of day in what is expected to be a list of four.
2014 will be quite an interesting year with interesting announcements like the Nokia Android Smartphone in the low end, Samsung second Windows Phone and other interesting devices above what Samsung will be announcing.
