Design and feature-rich smartphones may be the sweet spot for innovation and profits, but the mobile phone industry is shifting to bring more affordable smartphones to market.

According to John Jackson, vice president of research at CCS Insights, “smartphones moving down the value chain” has been a reoccurring theme in the industry for years, but at the Mobile World Congress event last month this theme grew louder and more forceful. He said that Warren East, CEO of ARM, talked about taking smartphones down to the sub-$100 range, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt talked about putting an Android in every pocket.

“It’s a race to enable aspiring users just as it was a race to connect them in the first place with their first mobile phones,” said Jackson.

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As we enter the Year of the Dragon, which began Monday with the Chinese New Year, the huge China mobile market is growing at breakneck speed. In 2011, mobile connections increased almost 17 percent and soon will top 1 billion.

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My tagline has always been that people confuse clever and cluttered — very different concepts. We want to make the applications and the experience smarter.

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