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Smartwatches are set to rival the dominance of tablets in the portable computing market by 2018, according to new research.
CCS Insight calculates that 135 million sales of wearable tech devices will occur by 2018, with 68 million of them being smartwatches.
This will be just shy of the 70 million iPads sold by Apple in 2013.
After smartwatches, CCS Insight predicts that smart writstbands will be the most popular wearable device in four year’s time.
Although fewer than 10 million wearable devices were sold last year, Marina Koytcheva, director of forecasting at CCS Insight, believes that once prices come down and the technology becomes more fashionable will rocket.
“There are very few smart gadgets that I’d want to put on myself right now — they’re all very techie-looking — but things are changing. Now that the technology has been proven, design is catching up,” said Koytcheva.
“We’re still in the stone age in the era of wearable technology, but people’s awareness of the technology is growing very fast. The big manufacturers are entering the market as they try to expand their product ranges.
“For people to cotton on to smart wearables, pricing also needs to come down . . . we saw it with tablet computers.”
