Smartphone prices 'will go below 100' this year

The cost of a smartphone will fall to well under £100 this year, one of the biggest technology providers predicted today.

Lee Williams, head of the Symbian Foundation, whose technology is the most widely used smartphone platform, told a mobile phones conference in Barcelona: "This year we will see a few products hitting that [100 - or £86] point."

The cheapest of Nokia's Symbian phones sells for about £100-£115 without the subsidies offered by the network operators. That compares with well over £200 for Apple's iPhone.

Smartphone prices are being driven down as manufacturers attempt to target more take-up by personal users, rather than business customers who started the smartphone trend through the Blackberry.

Smartphone component makers such as Qualcomm and Infineon are expected to play a key role in lowering costs through manufacturing scale and technical innovation.

"Operators are crying out for lower-cost smartphones to reduce their subsidy burden and to seed the mass-market with more advanced data devices," said analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.

"Lower-cost smartphones will drive up vendors' shipments, but they will simultaneously push down average selling prices and profit margins."

This month Samsung announced a plan to treble smartphone shipments this year and to promote its own software platform — which supports application developers — called bada, which it said would help demand grow in emerging markets.

"Symbian is well placed to dominate the entry-level smartphone market because of its close ties with Nokia and a huge presence in emerging markets such as China," Mawston said.