Report: Mid-tier phone market to get squeezed

The market for mid-tier phones, wedged between low-cost handsets and high-end smartphones, will continue to shrink over the next few years, according to Juniper Research. As low-income people snap up cheaper phones and the affluent adopt smartphones, mid-tier phones will become a distinct minority of the the market. By 2014, low-cost phones and smartphones are expected to make up 79 percent of the total handset market, or just over 1 billion units. Low-cost handset shipments are expected to number 700 million units in 2014, up 31 percent from 2008 levels. Release [1]