I’m a mobile geek and I like my smartphone toys but I’m starting to wonder if they are really necessary. Smartphone sales are increasing but I have this wild theory that in a few years they will cease to exist as a separate class of devices.<\/p>\n
First a definition. Not everyone even agrees what constitutes a smartphone. For the purpose of this argument it’s a device running a named mobile operating system including Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry and the iPhone’s OS X. Smartphones generally have full web browsers, fast processors, lots of memory and, except for the Blackberry, support installing native applications in addition to Java ones.<\/p>\n
What’s going to knock out the smartphone? Look for a one-two punch from ever more capable feature phones and Linux, especially Android.<\/p>\n
There’s a perception that you need a smartphone to have advanced applications and services on a phone. That used to be true but Java ME and the Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) of popular feature phones are getting to the point where they can do almost everything that a branded OS can.<\/p>\n
I don’t really care about OS labels but there are certain features that I require in a phone. Here’s my list. Note that all of these can be found in at least some mass-market feature phones.<\/p>\n
Given the abilities found in some feature phones it seems that it would be possible to build one every bit as capable as the best smartphone. And all other things being equal, it should be lighter, cheaper, easier to operate and have longer battery life than the equivalent smartphone.<\/p>\n
I think we are about to see an explosion of inexpensive feature phones running nameless operating systems but with abilities and performance rivaling today’s smartphones. Thank the iPhone for this. It’s raised ordinary consumer’s expectations of what a mobile phone can do. Normobs<\/a> want iPhone-like features at the traditional “free with 2 year contract” price point. Carriers and manufacturers can and will meet this demand by building iPhone-lites using off the shelf RTOS and Java applications.<\/p>\n Then there is Google which is building Android to dominate mobile advertising and cement it’s position as biggest and most profitable tech company. The big G is spending millions to build and give away a mobile OS and hardware reference design more powerful than Symbian, WinMo, Palm or Blackberry. Hardware manufacturers can build Android phones with zero licensing costs and minimal hardware design expense to provide another cheap alternative to the iPhone and to traditional smartphones.<\/p>\n It’s really not so much that the smartphone will die but that every phone will become a smartphone. There will always be high end devices but it will be harder and harder for Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, RIM and even Apple to differentiate themselves.<\/p>\n These changes will ultimately be good for the mobile ecosystem. The smartphone features that only 10% of users currently enjoy will go mainstream. As phones with advanced PIM functions, copy and paste, full web browsers like Opera Mini, apps like Google Maps and Mail and iTunes like content portals become the norm we will see a mobile computing surge that will make the PC and wired Web revolution of the last 30 years pale in comparison.<\/p>\n What do you think? Will the expansion of advanced features to mainstream handsets do away will the smartphone market? Comments<\/a> please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m a mobile geek and I like my smartphone toys but I’m starting to wonder if they are really necessary. Smartphone sales are increasing but I have this wild theory that in a few years they will cease to exist as a separate class of devices. First a definition. Not everyone even agrees what constitutes a smartphone. For the purpose of this argument it’s a device running a named mobile operating system including Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry and the … Continue reading