Employment in workplaces with demanding environments can be both physically and mentally exhausting, but the stresses that these job sites exert on smartphones is near catastrophic. In turn, to survive such demanding environments, a rugged device with military-grade protection is indeed the best smartphone option. Caterpillar, Verizon, and Panasonic are currently the top rugged smartphone manufacturers alongside Amrel, Sonim, Samsung, Sony, and DeWalt. These vendors hold the expertise to innovate and manufacture the finest rugged smartphones for construction work and other such demanding work sites.
What’s impeding progress in the rugged smartphone market?
The global rugged smartphone market, despite its escalating growth and focus on innovative products, will face numerous obstacles ranging from a decrease in the price of commercial consumer-grade devices to the high cost of rugged smartphones and increasing popularity of rugged tablets.
While the Americas serve as the primary engine powering the growth of the ruggedized smartphone market in the last few years, this progress will by and large be overshadowed by the weakening APAC market that has been exacerbated by low disposable income and the concentration of low capital infused commercial and industrials end-user segments.
Consumerization of rugged smartphones is the ideal solution
Despite alarms of erosion from consumer-grade devices, experts at Technavio believe that the latter will primarily serve as a counterpart rather than as replacement for the traditional brick-style rugged handhelds.
With the manufacturing of more durable devices, well-established standard laptop vendors like Apple and Samsung are posing the ultimate threat to the rugged smartphone device manufacturers’ plans to enter the common market. As a counter, the vendors are striving to produce the slimmest, thinnest, configurationally strong yet lightweight smartphones to attract the individual consumers rather than just focusing on the industrial audience.
The average rugged smartphone device manufacturer and their resellers are capable of delivering unique features including prodigious battery life, high powered memory, and excellent processing speed along with the toughness to withstand critical conditions. This serves as a positive sign for vendors to focus on the consumerization of these devices, thereby increasing the customer base and opening up newer audience groups.
Market insights will help the vendors strategize better
Experts at Technavio believe that there is a need for rugged smartphone vendors to re-establish their value proposition in light of the increased pressure from consumer devices and to close the perceived innovation gap.
Technavio’s market insights in this regard will help, allowing the vendors the bird’s eye view of the market’s prevalent conditions, competition, emerging trends and testing bottlenecks. This information can be used to re-strategize, and adapt to the fast-evolving marketplace.
