Worldwide shipments of used smartphones rose 9% to 225.4 million last year, reported IDC Thursday. It estimated a 6.4% drop for new phones. IDC predicts used smartphone shipments will reach 351.6 million in 2024 -- market value of $65 billion -- growing about 11% yearly. The used smartphone category is led by mature markets, where trade-ins act as a subsidy to push consumers upgrades, it noted, citing “rapid growth” in trade-in programs and average selling prices over the past year. Flagship phones rely heavily on trade-in programs to make upfront costs more affordable, said the research firm, referencing Apple, Samsung and Huawei’s “aggressive” trade-in offers. Carriers use trade-ins combined with bundled plans to spur upgrades, it noted. "In contrast to the recent declines in the new smartphone market, as well as the forecast for minimal growth in new shipments over the next few years, the used market for smartphones shows no signs of slowing," said analyst Anthony Scarsella.

The wireless power market is expected to reach $29.23 billion by 2027, Powercast said. It and Energous are among wireless charger makers unveiling new products this week (see also here).

The iPhone 12 series was 76% of U.S. iPhone sales in the four weeks following the Nov. 13 release date for the series' flagship iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, reported Consumer Intelligence Research Partners Tuesday. The $699 iPhone 12 mini was the underachiever, having been “lost among the other models,” said CIRP co-founder Josh Lowitz. The mini “likely disappointed Apple with only 6% of sales,” said co-founder Mike Levin, noting the 5.4-inch model has most of the features as the other iPhone 12 models, in a smaller form. Share of the 12 mini was just above that of iPhone XR, which launched in 2018 and is now priced at $499; the one-year-old iPhone 11, now selling for $599; and the second-generation iPhone SE, launched in April at $399. Sales were fairly evenly distributed among the 12, 12 Pro and 12 Max, CIRP said. It surveyed 243 consumers November-December.

Global semiconductor sales increased 7% in November from a year earlier, up 1.1% sequentially, reported the Semiconductor Industry Association. It was the largest year-on-year monthly increase since March, said CEO John Neuffer. Sales for 2020 were tracking “well ahead of the total from 2019, despite substantial headwinds caused by the pandemic and other macroeconomic factors,” he said. Sales into the Americas jumped 12.5% from a year earlier in November, the 11th-straight month of double-digit increases, he said.

5G was built into two-thirds of AMOLED smartphones shipped in Q4 and 47% in all of 2020, reported Display Supply Chain Consultants Monday. Q3 AMOLED smartphone panel shipments fell year over year for the second straight quarter due to weakened demand from the pandemic and delays in Apple’s iPhone 12 launch, said DSCC. But Q4 was expected to have been a record quarter for AMOLED smartphone panels by “wide margins,” it said. Apple’s all-OLED launch in the flagship iPhone 12 lineup was responsible for most of the Q4 upswing in AMOLED smartphone panel shipments, said DSCC.

LG Display will showcase new transparent OLED applications at virtual CES, including a 55-inch display that rises from a frame at the foot of a bed, presenting information or TV programming in various screen ratios, it said Thursday. LG’s Cinematic Sound is embedded in the frame, which is designed to be portable for transferring between rooms. For commercial applications, LG will demonstrate a 55-inch transparent OLED display in a restaurant zone, where guests waiting for their order can view a movie or TV program while watching the chef prepare their order on the other side of the display. A transit application will show a transparent display as a replacement window on a subway train, providing subway line maps and news, while allowing passengers to view passing scenery, said the company. Other applications are smart homes, smart buildings, autonomous vehicles and aircraft.

5G smartphones, “the most accelerated mobile technology generation ever launched,” could reach sub-$200 price points in 2021, causing challenges for the industry, said ABI Research analyst David McQueen in a 2021 trend forecast Tuesday. 5G’s fast adoption brings a “raft of technical challenges” that may lead to substantial changes in mobile device design, McQueen said. Availability of 5G smartphone models will become more diverse, “brought to market quickly at a wide variety of price points, democratizing the 5G experience,” said the analyst. A “seismic shift to lower price tiers” will be the main growth driver for accelerated 5G adoption, made possible by affordable chipsets from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Unisoc, said McQueen. That will leave a “squeezed” high end of 5G smartphones, he said. Smartphone replacement cycles could benefit short term, but the fast-tracked migration of 5G to lower-tier phones could have a domino effect on average selling prices and overall profitability. “It would be of little surprise if 2021 saw 5G smartphones fall below the $200 mark, driven by the availability of cheaper components and pricing policies of chipset vendors,” said the analyst. 5G will have positive and negative impact on the environment, said analyst Jun Wei Ee. The synergy between 5G and artificial intelligence and the IoT could mean lower energy consumption and increased efficiencies in operations long term, but energy consumption could also increase tremendously in the 5G world as the higher speeds encourage more usage among consumers and applications, he said. Accelerated adoption also will lead to large amounts of electronic waste, said the analyst. He urged operators and manufacturers to do more to encourage recycling and use of recycled materials in their 5G efforts. Geopolitical trade wars left their mark on the smartphone market, with Huawei at the center, said McQueen. Huawei is a market leader, with about 20% global share, but it's “struggling to stay in the market in the longer term and rebuild its now tainted brand outside of China,” McQueen said. A diminished Huawei would leave a void that current smartphone vendors would rush to fill, McQueen said, citing Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus. It could also enable resurrection of “once-notable” smartphone brands including LG, Motorola, Nokia-HMD and Sony, he said. Ultra-wideband (UWB) will be ubiquitous in 2021, said ABI. Increased adoption will result from wider chipset availability, adoption across multiple segments and a “healthy UWB ecosystem across the entire supply chain,” said analyst Andrew Zignani.

Trade-in and resell company Gazelle is ending its trade-in service Feb. 1, it emailed customers Wednesday. Mobile device trade-ins in process will “continue as planned,” it said, providing a link for customers to check on status. Consumers will still be able to buy used electronics from Gazelle’s online store “for a fraction of the price,” the company said, while steering trade-in customers to sister brand ecoATM's kiosks in 4,000 locations across the U.S. Gazelle was acquired in 2015 by Outerwall (see 1510300028), which was bought by Apollo Global Management a year later. After Apollo’s purchase, former components of Outerwall, Redbox, Coinstar and ecoATM became separate businesses. As of July, ecoATM Gazelle had collected over 25 million phones and tablets from consumers, it said. Redbox still operates about 41,000 video rental kiosks in the U.S.

New Samsung QLED TVs launching globally in 2021 will support a new "HDR10+ Adaptive" feature that adjusts picture quality to ambient room light, said the manufacturer Wednesday. “HDR10+ Adaptive supports Filmmaker Mode and adapts to brighter rooms so customers can enjoy a true cinematic experience with HDR10+ movies and television programs in any environment at home,” said Samsung, developer of the HDR10+ dynamic-metadata technology. It’s unclear what the company meant in suggesting HDR10+ Adaptive supports Filmmaker Mode, the independent TV picture setting hatched by the UHD Alliance in summer 2019 for rendering better movie watching in the living room as creators intended it. Filmmaker Mode works mostly through automatic metadata detection in a TV to deactivate motion smoothing and other processing optimized for live sports when the set senses that the content being rendered is a movie or episodic TV show. It’s also available on TVs from LG and Vizio that support Dolby Vision. “With HDR10+ and Filmmaker mode, Prime Video content is optimized regardless of the viewing environment and customers can enjoy movies and TV shows the way the filmmakers intended,” said BA Winston, Amazon Prime Video global head-video playback and delivery. It was Amazon’s most explicit known endorsement of Filmmaker Mode, after fleeting references on a Sept. 30 UHD Alliance webinar that Prime Video will launch the feature "on select players next year.” Samsung touted Amazon Prime Video support for HDR10+ for years, evidenced by the many hours of content available on the service embedded with Samsung's preferred HDR technology. Samsung critics countered that Amazon Prime Video's HDR10+ hasn't been well-publicized.

Aggregation, security and voice control are key areas in the surging pay-TV streaming video market as consumers continue their exodus from traditional pay TV, panelists told Parks Associates’ recent Future of Video virtual conference. “The value of aggregation is huge,” said Ben Grad, fuboTV head-content strategy and acquisition, saying over-the-top video customers will “continue to flock” to services that offer a wide range of content “all in one place, on one platform, on devices they already have in their home.” Consumers don’t want to split their viewership among a dozen different apps, he said. More viewers are moving to aggregation platforms for streaming channels to simplify billing and access services through a single interface, said Parks analyst Kristen Hanich. Content aggregation will be “interesting” amid a fragmented OTT market, said Lu Bolden, Verimatrix chief revenue officer. It’s a challenge for the industry when a customer searches for content to “figure out what that end user’s authorized for through what platform,” he said. “Did they sign up through fubo for this particular piece of content, or this channel, or through Philo?” Services will want to keep subscribers in an environment that gives them access to applications and content “so that everyone can monetize this along the way,” said Bolden. That requires “complex insight” into data, authorization information and agreements among intermediaries. Voice control has an essential role in helping consumers find content in a fragmented space, panelists said, though Megan Dover, Cox executive director-video and entertainment product management and development, sees it as evolutionary technology. On whether far-field mics might be built into a set-top boxes vs. integrated into the handheld remote, Dover said Cox is studying the possibility as an “ideal” offering for the future. “It would be great to be able to not touch a remote control and say, ‘I want to watch …,' and it starts playing,” she said, but customers are also used to being able to pause, rewind and fast-forward within a program. Those commands are still cumbersome for voice control, Dover said. Sports betting is also becoming more popular on TV services, and security will be important as that segment expands, said Verimatrix’s Bolden. Implementing monetary transactions on platforms previously used only for viewing entertainment will be an issue, he said. It’s challenging to tie in authentication of users “as they’re moving from platform to platform” and make it easy for them to move from a smartphone to a TV to another device while having to remember passwords, Bolden said: “You want to make the experience for the end user easy, so they’ll stay on your platform -- but still secure.”