The mobile industry is on a boom with several new players. These entrants have been eating into the pie of the top five handset manufacturers like Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry. Recent findings unraveled by BuzzCity, based on metrics up until October 2010 taken from its free mobile games portal, Djuzz, support the aforementioned details.
The platform deploys games built on Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Java, Flash and BlackBerry. It also delivers games for feature phones which lie at the lower end of the mobile phone spectrum. The portal claims to proffer games for over 1,800 handsets.
“White box competition will continue to cannibalise sales from the major manufacturers, largely by mimicking handsets like iPhone or BlackBerry, while offering more features such as multiple SIM capabilities, at lower price points. We believe the game ultimately lies with those who control hardware, software and services and these localized ‘white box’ handsets will soon need to add value with services; users have moved beyond using phones as just a communications tool and the growing priority for consumers is getting more and better content into their phones,” said Dr. KF Lai, CEO at BuzzCity.
Due to improved handset detection, the company can detect the type of handsets gamers are using. Further, Buzzcity has discovered that ‘white box’ manufacturers from across Asia are amassing 20 percent of overall downloads as compared to only 8 percent the previous month. According to the Djuzz data, mid-sized OEMs are grabbing the market with affordable prices in countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and China. These include MicroMax (India), Nexian (Indonesia / Malaysia), K-Touch (China), Spice Mobile(India) and Visual Fan (Romania).
BuzzCity boasts of delivering over 6.5 million games in October itself, amounting to a 12 percent increase from the September count.