Smartphones eat up 5.9 percent of the electronic gadget market

According to market research firm NPD Group, sales of general purpose smartphones are causing the market for standalone gadgets such as cameras, camcorders and GPS devices to shrink, falling 5.9 percent overall during the holiday season in the US.

Sales of camcorders dropped by 43 percent, digital picture frames by 38 percent, GPS navigation devices by 33 percent and both MP3 players and "point and shoot" cameras were down 21 percent, all apparent casualties of the general purpose smartphone. Sales of electronic devices that don't directly overlap in functionality with the smartphone fared better, with PC and TV sales down just 4 percent. Desktop PCs were down 2 percent overall, while notebook sales were down 5 percent.

As for TVs, noteworthy to say that sales of HDTVs larger than 50 inches helped reverse the decline among TVs, sales of home theater systems increased by 10 percent and sales of stand-alone streaming devices jumped by 65 percent. But Blu-ray players followed the trend. Their sales were down 17 percent after growing 3.8 percent last year.

"The accelerated rate of decline in older technology categories such as DVD, GPS and MP3 players put a ceiling on how well the industry could perform during the holiday," wrote NPD's vice president of industry analysis Stephen Baker.