Smartphones: Where do we go from here?
Whether you are a fan of Apple products or not you probably owe a debt of gratitude to the company if you like to do more on your phone than just send and receive SMSs and talk to you friends and family.
Just a few years ago the smartphone market was a pretty dreary place. You had Windows Mobile phones, you had some Symbian driven phones and Blackberry. Now for some those phones were more than good enough and met most of their mobile communication needs. For the rest of us, however, these were pretty frustrating times. Interfaces were not intuitive, you had limited choices on how things could be done and everything was driven by either a pointer of some kind or by using a stylus.
Personally I hated all of them, especially Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called at the time). They just didn’t fit my personality, I found it hard to locate any setting I wanted to change and installing applications on these phones was typically an expensive and time consuming endeavor.
If anyone ever had any doubts over the benefit of competition in the business world then a quick look at the evolution of the smartphone since the launch of the iPhone should provide an illuminating illustration. From three or four mediocre phone operating systems we now have at least six world-class smartphone operating systems in mass production. These are (in no particular order) iOS, Blackberry 6, Android, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and WebOS.
In the next month or so we should start seeing Windows Phone 7 handsets arriving on our shelves and even though it is not perfect, every new phone OS that we can access is a step forward in liberating us from our computers.
If I had to list the innovations that I think have made the biggest difference to the smartphone market I would start with the screens – adding decent touchscreens has liberated us from the stylus (something that we should all be grateful for). The faster processors give us that snappy response rather than the tap and wait of old. Finally, the operating systems are now an order of magnitude more user friendly than ever before.
The only part of the system that still lets us down is battery life. I would love for my phone to last for more than a day without having to be recharged.
Where do we go from here?
I have had a view on where computing is going to go for quite some time now and while the idea has evolved over time the basic concept remains constant.
What I want is a smartphone that can run a mobile optimized operating system and at the same time have the power to deliver a full desktop operating environment when coupled to a larger display and an external power source.
You would be able to come into the office, dock your phone and instantly it would power up your monitor, connect to your mouse and keyboard and provide full access to your office or home applications.
With more and more applications becoming accessible from cloud-based services the need for lots of local storage will fall away. Even gaming services are moving to the cloud and the desktop will provide the link between a network and the user.
Obviously we need some local storage plus a reliable connection and that will depend on our local service providers coming to the party. In a few year’s time I wouldn’t be surprised to see the first devices coming to market that offer a full computing experience – a desktop, a tablet and a mobile experience wrapped in one.
Of course when someone steals your phone you are well and truly screwed, but that is a differnet issue altogether.
Smartphones: Where do we go from here? << Comments and views
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