Smartphones Have an Unexpected New Rival from Regular Feature Cell phones

Feature cell phones have lately made some impressive gains. After years of almost continuous decline, global shipments have grown for two consecutive quarters. Growth in emerging markets has been especially impressive: In Africa, feature-phone shipments surged 32 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2016, compared to a decline of 5.2 percent for smartphones. Expect that trend to continue, for a few reasons.

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Feature Cell Phones like older Nokia and flip phones are very durable where they can last over 5 years, so in wild and rough places like Africa, Feature phones maybe a popular choice because of their durability.

I think some people would rather carry around a cheap $99-200 laptops, or a tablet like the $50 Kindle Fire tablet, and use a cheap $10-20 feature cell phone for calling and texting which maybe a uncommon form of communication for poor people since a lot of cheap prepaid plans limit the amount of talk time, and amount of text messages which you can send per month.

The gaming and app usage experience on many cheap laptops, and tablets are usually better than the user experience of cheap smartphones which sometimes have slowdown problems when using basic apps like the web browser, Instagram, and Facebook which are usually work okay on cheap laptops, and tablets with an Intel Atom/Celeron CPU found on Chromebooks and Windows 10 netbooks, and quad-core mobile CPU 1.3 GHz found on cheaper tablets like the $50 Amazon Fire tablet.

The price of good digital cameras, handheld consoles, and MP3 players are cheaper these days, so people may end up saving money by using individual devices instead of buying one cell phone.

2045 said:

I don't know about digital cameras. Unless you're a professional photographer, they seem pretty outdated to me nowadays. Why bother carrying an extra device with you if your smartphone can take amazing photos?

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Digital Cameras are cheap. You can probably get a decent used digital camera for $20 on eBay, Craigslist, flea market, or a pawn shop.

The battery life on some digital cameras are better than smartphones, and if you disable the LCD screen on the camera and only use the glass viewfinder lens on the top of the camera, you can extend the battery even more.

Some digital cameras also use AA batteries which you can get from almost all stores like convenience stores. It is also easy to swap out SD cards when one SD card is full in the camera.

But, most people who only take a few photos per day will be fine with a smartphone camera unless they have very specific needs like they need a good lens, and a lens which can zoom in and out to take pictures of far away things easier.

Danielx64 said:

I also found that with cameras, while the ones taken on a phone may look good on the phone screen, when it comes to viewing then on the computer and printing it can be bad. It not always like that but it can happen.

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I think most cheaper phones come with lower quality cameras lens and camera parts, and many smartphone makers may not think that many people will print out their photos compared to Camera makers where many of the users may still print out photos.

The front camera on phones is generally lower quality because it is mostly used for video calling, and taking selfie pictures to post on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and to save money, so the phone maker can sell the phone for less money.