IDC: Tablets with cellular voice capabilities are getting traction in Asia Pacific
Talking On Tablets On The Rise In Asia — The phone-sized tablet — aka the phablet — was born in Asia, so it's fitting that the region is now apparently driving a trend for talking on even larger slabs of glass and plastic.
Context & Ripple Effects
IDC's finding lands on top of an arc the corpus has been tracking since 2011, when GigaOM's forecast of 180 million tablets by 2014 framed the category as a consumption slab, and Canalys projected last November that half of all PCs shipped in 2014 would be tablets, with Android taking 65% of them (Canalys' 2014 tablet forecast). What changes with this report is what those devices do: in Asia Pacific they are increasingly carrying SIMs and voice minutes, not just Wi-Fi and video.
That regional skew is consistent with Flurry's July 2013 device and app trends report on China, which positioned the world's largest mobile market as an early adopter of oversized phones. The phablet was born there, and IDC is now reporting the same logic scaling up to full-size tablets. Eight outlets — ZDNet, PC World, PC Magazine, The Next Web among them — picked up the story within a day, unusual breadth for a regional shipment-pattern note.
First-order effects
- Android tablet vendors selling into Asia Pacific gain a working differentiator over Wi-Fi-only slabs: one device covering both data and voice, which matters most in markets where a single connected device carries household weight.
- Carriers in the region get a new SIM-attached device category to tariff and bundle, extending voice plans beyond handsets for the first time at scale.
Second-order effects
- Apple's iPad line, positioned around Wi-Fi-first consumption rather than calling, faces pressure to justify its cellular strategy in exactly the region where large-screen voice use is normalizing.
- Cellular modem and baseband suppliers see attach rates on non-phone form factors climb, shifting their volume mix away from smartphones alone.
Third-order effects
- If voice-capable tablets keep spreading from Asia Pacific outward, the screen-size boundary that defines 'phone' versus 'tablet' stops mapping to function, pushing analysts and regulators toward treating them as one large-screen mobile device market.
- Carrier economics built on handset subsidies would have to absorb a second subsidized form factor, or shift toward device-agnostic data-and-voice plans.
The trend: Device categories defined by screen size are dissolving as voice-capable large slabs move from Asia-Pacific niche to global default, with the region that invented the phablet again setting the pace.