The arrival of 5G is not only changing smart phones, smart watches are also being re-activated. Last week, vivo’s first smartwatch, vivo WATCH, was officially announced to the public. So far, the four major domestic manufacturers of Huami OV, plus the two international giants of Samsung and Apple, have completed their deployment in smart watch products . All signs indicate that smartwatches have already taken the lead, and the battle for IoT entry will become more intense.
Mobile phone manufacturers have turned into “watch factories”
Smart watches began to appear in 2014. First, Google launched the operating system Android Wear, and then Samsung, LG, Moto and other major manufacturers successively launched smart watches, and with the advent of Apple Watch, smart watch products ushered in a wave of climax.
But people’s enthusiasm for smart watches did not last long. According to IDC data, global smartwatch sales in Q3 2016 fell 51.6% year-on-year, Apple Watch sales fell nearly 72% year-on-year, and the smart watch market ushered in a cold winter. The reason is that the practicability of smart watches at that time was not high, and the smart applications that they could provide were very few, and their functions were limited to message reminders or step counting tools. When the user’s freshness is over, the smart watch can only be placed in the corner to “eat the dust”.
After entering the 5G era, the meaning of smart watches has changed. The first is intelligence. Today’s smart watches can be said to be small phones that support independent calls, play music, download APPs, and have very powerful motion detection functions, which can automatically identify the state of motion, heart rate sleep detection is very detailed, and support independent calls The battery life of the watch will be shorter. Professional sports watches focus on long battery life, which can be used for 20-30 days when fully charged.
The second is the health management function of the smart watch, which supports a variety of exercise modes, and can also view information such as heart rate changes, exercise trajectories, and calorie consumption. In addition, the smartwatch also supports arrhythmia/premature beats/atrial fibrillation screening, and can accurately identify deep sleep, light sleep, rapid eye movement and wakefulness, and give sleep quality assessment and improvement suggestions.
The second IoT track has been opened
As the competition in the mobile phone market has gradually entered the zero-sum game stage, domestic mobile phone manufacturers will face more intense market competition. Many organizations have recently released second-quarter survey reports on the mobile phone market. Although the survey data of each company is not the same, they all reveal the fact that global smartphone shipments are continuously declining.
Research firm Gartner reported that in the second quarter of this year, the shipments of smart manufacturers without exception experienced a sharp decline, leading to a year-on-year decline of more than 20% in global smart phone shipments. In addition to the decline in sales, global smartphone production fell sharply year-on-year in the second quarter. TrendForce, a market research organization, released the latest survey, showing that the total global smartphone production in the second quarter of this year was 286 million units, an increase of 2.2% from the previous quarter, but a year-on-year decline of 16.7%, the largest year-on-year decline in a single quarter over the years.
The continued decline in smartphone shipments is mainly due to the fact that the smartphone market has approached saturation, and the cold winter period in the mobile phone market has also led to a prolonged replacement cycle for consumers. And 5G is considered to be a powerful growth point for the new round of mobile phone industry, leading companies have entered the game, 5G research and development are in full swing, and 5G mobile phones are also accelerating in popularity.
In the 5G era, the huge replacement market can reverse the current decline in the smartphone market, but to win the second half of the smartphone competition, IoT seems to be a “sideline business” for mobile phone manufacturers. Domestic mobile phone manufacturers, such as Xiaomi, Huawei, OV, etc., have launched their own IoT strategies and their own smart home products. With the large-scale commercialization of 5G networks in 2020, the second track of IoT will also open.
As one of the earliest manufacturers to deploy IoT in China, Xiaomi has successively launched many products such as bracelets, TVs, air conditioners, sweeping robots, etc., and have related layouts in the fields of smart home, smart home appliances, health wearables, and travel vehicles.
Lei Jun said at the beginning of the year that 2020 is the year of Xiaomi’s 5G business, a key year for Xiaomi to promote the “mobile phone + AIoT” dual engine, and clarified the strategic direction of “5G + AI + IoT next-generation super Internet”. On the “5G+AIoT” battlefield, Xiaomi will invest at least 50 billion yuan in the next five years.
On September 24, OPPO officially announced at the Developer Conference (ODC20) that it will release the first OPPO smart TV in October as a content ecological portal for home scenarios under the Internet of Everything. At the same time, OPPO launched the “Energy-Energy Action 2.0” plan. The first phase invested a total of 200 million yuan in resources to invest in the construction of the IoT ecosystem from four aspects: technology, products, marketing, and channels.
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