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Growth of Consumer Electronics Wi-Fi Enabled Devices

The quest for connectivity continues to drive Consumer Electronics (CE) manufacturers to enable their products with Wi-Fi wireless technology -- both for incremental home networking applications and ongoing access to public hotspots while mobile.

The next 5 years will see an increase in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, from over 500 million in 2009 to nearly 2 billion in 2014, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.

Devices leading the pace of adoption include Blu-ray disc players and recorders, e-readers, digital televisions with built-in IP connectivity and low-cost IP video set-top boxes -- such as the Roku digital video player.

"The reality of 802.11n-enabled devices being available is that many of the technical issues that constrained Wi-Fi adoption in video-centric CE devices in the past have been remedied," says Frank Dickson, Vice President of Research.

"As a result, we expect the adoption of Wi-Fi in the living room to accelerate. Across all 'digital living room' consumer electronics, which includes set-top boxes, game consoles, and other such devices, Wi-Fi-enabled devices will exceed 200 million units by 2014."

In-Stat's market study findings include the following:

- Mobile devices with Wi-Fi will still dominate shipments. In 2013, shipments of mobile phones with embedded Wi-Fi are projected to exceed three-quarters of a billion units.

- E-readers Wi-Fi attach rates will increase from 3 percent in 2009 to 88 percent by 2014.

- 29 million digital picture frames will be shipped in 2014 -- 53 percent will be Wi-Fi-enabled.

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