More than 170,000 attendees will flock to Las Vegas this week for the annual showcase of hot technology — the Consumer Electronics Show — as drones, driverless cars and virtual reality move closer to centre stage.

While the electronics used in smartphones have ushered in the era of “internet of things” with its smartwatches and connected car dashboards, nothing has emerged to replace the mobile handset in fuelling sales and profits.

 

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“We are kind of in a lull in mobile, a trough between two waves of innovation,” says Benedict Evans, a partner at tech investor Andreessen Horowitz. “The first wave of changes from mobile have played out but we haven’t seen the next wave come just yet.”

The smartphone market slipped into single-digit growth for the first time in 2015, according to analyst group IDC, with shipments up 9.8 per cent to 1.43bn units, as a wider economic slowdown in China bites. What growth there is comes largely from lower-cost handsets.

In the most developed mobile markets, some fear that smartphone growth may soon grind to a halt altogether. CCS Insight has predicted that smartphone sales in western Europe and North America will start to slowly decline after 2017.

John Curran, a global managing director at Accenture’s communications, media and technology group, also sees a “bit of an innovation interlude”. This year’s CES will see less “glitz” of new gadgetry and instead put “a lot more emphasis on the practical”, Mr Curran says. He believes the emphasis will be on trying to persuade consumers of the value of new ideas such as the “connected home” and wearable devices.

At last year’s CES, many eyed smartwatches and other wearable devices as the next big platform to arrive after the smartphone, ahead of Apple Watch’s launch in April.

Growth in wearables has been robust, with Fitbit taking a commanding lead in health trackers, which are the largest segment. But the overall wearables market remains tiny compared with smartphones. IDC estimates sales of 21m units, up nearly 200 per cent, in the third quarter of 2015. However, Apple alone sold 48m iPhones in the same period.

The uncertain early performance of the Apple Watch is also hanging over the broader wearables industry, as well as weighing on Apple’s stock, which ended 2015 down 7.7 per cent on the year.

At Glance, a conference in San Francisco last month dedicated to the device, venture capitalists and analysts were divided on its prospects. Ben Bajarin, analyst at Creative Strategies, predicts that 100m Apple Watches will be sold by the end of 2017, putting it on a similar pace to the iPad’s early years.