According to recent study.
Consumers are looking beyond handsets as smartwatch and smart speaker sales boom, a Telsyte study on the Australian smartphone and wearable devices market has found.
Telsyte estimates that 3.5 million smartwatches were in use at the end of 2018 as consumer behaviour increasingly shifts to new devices that work alongside smartphones and apps. There were 1.1 million smart wrist wearable devices, combined smartwatch and smart bands sold in 2H18, up 30% from 2H17. Sales of smartwatches continued to lead the category, with 65% smartwatch versus 35% smart wristbands.
Apple remained the leading vendor in smart wrist wearables sales in 2H18, followed by Fitbit and Garmin.
In addition to the growth in wearables, Telsyte estimates 1.6 million Australian households were using smart speakers, such as Google Home, Amazon Echo and Apple HomePod, at the end of December 2018, up from 538,000 or 6% of households in 2017.
Google is leading the smart speaker market with 72% share of main smart speaker in use in Australian households. Promotions over the holiday period underpinned the strong uptake which Telsyte predicts will continue into 2019.
A fast-growing area of smartphone usage has been mobile payments, with nearly half of all mobile payment users claiming to use it ‘regularly’ to pay for goods and services whenever possible.
Following this trend, Telsyte research shows, one in eight Australians aged 16 to 34 years have changed or joined a new banking provider due to the lack of mobile payments support, and 14% of Apple Watch users have also done so.