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Tablets that make phone calls are the next big thing

Ever since Samsung released its first Galaxy Note smartphone, consumers have been hankering for larger displays and resolutions. At 5.5 inches the Galaxy Note’s display was a monster in its time but it has quickly become rather average in size with modern Android smartphones regularly tipping the scales at 5 inches and over.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us that a new trend has emerged where sales of tablets with displays of 7 inches and larger with built-in voice call functionality have sky-rocketed in the last 12 months.

According to industry analysts IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker report shipments of cellular voice enabled tablets in the Asia/Pacific region the second three months of 2014 grew by 60% versus the same period in 2013. That meant that around one in every four tablets of the 13.8 million that shipped was capable of making cellular calls although whether consumers were actually using them for that purpose isn’t known.

The massive demand for the voice-enabled tablets has come particularly from developing markets like India and Indonesia where almost half of the total sales of tablets had voice capabilities built into them.

The growth can be explained by the fact that budgetary constraints in the developing world motivates people to buy a single device that can act as both a smartphone and a tablet, often with the added benefit of the bargain box pricing that some Android tablet manufacturers seem to be able to achieve.

Since the Asia/Pacific region generally leads the way in the trend towards larger phones, we may have to expect tablets attached to people’s faces in the near future although hopefully they’ll implement solutions similar to the one Sony has with the voice-call-capable Xperia Tablet Z2 with its separate phone accessory.

[Source – IDC, Via – TechCrunch]

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