I had the privilege of walking the CES floor and trying hard to cover as much as I could for Gear Diary this past week. It was, as you can imagine, absolutely geek heaven. I can’t even count how many smartphone accessories I saw this week, but one common thread stood out among the many mixed styles: if you want a nice case for your phone, buy an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy S3, or a Note 2. Otherwise, you probably won’t see much case love.
Now, seeing iPhone cases everywhere isn’t a big surprise at all. But all week I heard variations of “Here is our line of iPhone cases, and we just rolled out cases for the Galaxy S3 and/or the Note 2.” No one mentioned a single HTC phone. Nor did the Nexus 4, the Nokia Lumia line, or anything from Motorola get even a passing thought. If you wandered into CES with no prior knowledge of the depth of the smartphone market, you would probably think there were only three phones available!
Though, if the accessory market is an indicator of where the money and interest is flowing, there might as well be only three! Clearly, Samsung’s two phones and the iPhone 5 have taken the lion’s share of the phone market, as Mike has noted before. Now that they have the accessory and aftermarket too, is there any room left for anyone else?