Recently one of my dear friends asked me to suggest a good mobile phone within his budget and I suggested a Samsung phone that crams everything you can think of except the kitchen sink ;-). He asked me why not one other Motorola phone that is doing the rounds in newspapers and tv ads freqeuntly, and then I realised that both the phones were in fact loaded with similar features and fell within the same price band.
My topic for today is exactly on this situation that technological innovations has left us with.
If we go five years back in time when mobile phones having a megapixel camera was a rarity, this situation didn't seem to exist. Samsung phones were marred by poor battery backup, Motorola had the slowest UI response. Sony Ericsson was the only brand that sported a decent music player which was its USP and Nokia's smartphone abilities were meant for business people. Heck, Blackberry was not even within the reach of Indian consumers.
In the early 2000s having a phone that did not weigh more than an oxford dictionary and barely fitted into our pockets was fad. Slowly we moved onto color screens and cameras. In built music players that supported mp3 files was the next step and then came megapixel cameras.
Second half of the decade saw the rising of Bluetooth, Mp4 Video players and touchscreen.
Zooming back to 2010, Samsung is a market leader in both feature and smartphone segments, Motorola sports the most cutting edge hardware and both phones largely use Android OS. Nokia, LG and Sony Ericsson are on the brink of being neglected. The biggest thing seems to be social networking. Phones from every price segment seem to sport a basic facebook or twitter link and some even have dedicated apps for the same speaking of which Mobile Apps have become one of the most important factors in choosing a smart phone. (thanks almost completely to the Apple's App Store)
So where is technology taking us in the future?
I, for one, feel that mobile phones will completely replace desktop computers for casual computing (Browsing the internet and checking emails). Desktops will only be used where heavy computing power is required such as for gaming or media rendering.
With the ease with which mobiles phones render web sites these days and thanks to browsers like Opera and the newer webkit based browsers, it will seem neanderthal to boot your bulky computer, login to your profile, click on the browser and wait for it to load and then check your mails. With the migration of most of our data onto clouds it will makes more sense to depend on these pocket sized devices though they lack the storage capacity of full fledged computers.
Microsoft Kin was an example of where future mobile phones will go. Though the Kin series failed to rake in enough cash for the Redmond giant, it sure made other brands wake up and reorient themselves to the direction of cloud computing.
Everything that the user consumes or produces on the Kin was stored on the cloud and literally removed the need for gigabytes of memory built into the phone.
Apps have become as popular as social networking if not more, though I seriously do not understand the hype given for the latter (Especially Facebook).
The differentiation in hardware that the phone brands used to advertise some years ago has completely gone and even rookies in the business come up with cutting edge hardware, take for instance the 12 megapixel phone S1200 by Spice Communications.
The future belongs to software the example of which can be seen in Android OS and Apple's App Store.
The rise and fall of brands will be decided by factors hitherto unexplored in the industry such as:
How big is the application market for the phone brand?
How easy to use is the OS?
How many services can the phone integrate (Social networking, Microsoft Exchange, RSS)?
How sound is the Syncing system?
What else can my phone do apart from the plethora of functionalities already offered? (Phones are being used in telemedicing and as a replacement to credit cards)
These are questions that will be in the minds of every educated consumer. The Indian market will expect not much lesser than the western countries (India is the second largest and the fastest growing mobile phone market)
The leaders of the past are struggling to gain back their lost marketshare and questions like these are good starting points for them to relook at their strategy.
At the end of the day, consumers like you and me will be getting the maximum bang for the buck with competition scrambling for all kinds of differentiation. The future is bright for every mobile phone buyer :-D
