Smartphone beyond 2013

If you are checking this blog for some time, I would guess that you are aware of tremendous growth of smartphone as a market segment and probably are curious like me about what the future holds for this nice little device that have become indispensable part of our daily existence. I would bet that there are many among us who almost wear the device 24x7, well may be I should exclude the time when we sleep. The point is remaining connected all the time has become a necessary aspect of our life so much so, many would feel extreme mental trauma at the mere thought of losing the device. For handset vendors this is a place that anyone would dream to be in.

Monthly smartphone OS market-share chart: source comScore research

Billions of customers, Trillions of opportunities to know the users and create avenues to make money. Apple showed the way to others about how to create revenue opportunities by not only selling device but from everyday use of the phone. Google and Microsoft are in the race now. At present device selling earns most revenue for Apple but eventually as the evolution of device reaches mature stage, it will be the apps and other cloud services that Apple provide that become larger revenue avenue for Apple. Google and Microsoft are preparing themselves for those days and chances are high that Google and Microsoft's revenue share will be higher than Apple's, since there will be more smartphones that will use Android [and Windows likely] than iOS. For a quick reference on relative market growth so far for smartphone OS like Android, iOS, Windows, see the latest chart from comScore.

Does this mean that future innovations in smartphones are going to to be driven by OS vendors?

To answer the question, let us look at Nokia's published mobile strategy after their OS strategy shifted to Windows OS. It says clearly that while Nokia will depend on Microsoft for OS, Nokia's R&D will focus more on Services (Cloud-aware Apps development) and Mobile Phone hardware platform to deliver an enriching experience to the users. The strategy is somewhat similar to what Samsung is following of late, though Samsung is focusing more on phone platform at present. In fact Nokia ans Samsung are telling us that the hardware platform is going to dominate the innovation space for smartphone in the near future. We will see, faster and more powerful processor [Qualcomm's 1 GHz snapdragon processor already found popularity], powerful graphics processors, sleek form factor, brighter and sharper display, flexible touch screen, sharper camera, faster data with LTE and next-generation Wi-Fi, more sensors to gather data about user's surrounding and emotional presence. Though there will not be perpetual energy source, battery life between two recharges will increase 10 times in next couple of years given that two large market segments viz automobile and smartphone/tablets are pushing the battery technology for faster innovation.

Google Glas

But real winners will be those who will combine all these components into an encompassing whole delivering an experience so rich that users will identify herself/himself with the phone. Wearable phones may be more available with the advent of Google Glass but some believe that differentiating smartphone innovations are going to be more service-oriented after the initial phase. Quoting CNET, Mark Rolston, the creative director for Frog Design, thinks that smartphones are just about out of evolutionary advances. Sure, form factors and materials might alter as manufacturers grasp for differentiating design, but in terms of innovative leaps, Rolston says, "we're at the end of gross innovation for smartphones." CNET observes, Rolston and other future thinkers who study the mobile space conclude, smartphones will become increasingly impactful in interacting with our surrounding world, but more as one smaller piece of a much large, interconnected puzzle abuzz with data transfer and information.Your activity will be captured and analyzed from second to second. Relevant information will be distilled by powerful analytics engine running on compute cloud and feed it back to your phone which will guide you in dealing with your surroundings in real-time basis. Gaming for example, definitely will be lot more richer and many of your usual chores of the day will be gamified. Gamification deals about changing a certain experience in a way that is more fun, more entertaining for the users. If you are marathon enthusiast, a typical gaming app will track your progress, provide real-time feedback, feed you about marathon events in your locality, help you to define targets and guide you progress towards them, help you to identify your competitions and show you in real-time how well or badly you are faring against them. The idea is to help you live in your personalized world as much as possible and future smartphone/tablets would be the gadgets to deliver that experience.

Further Clicks: 

Stuff Article: http://www.stuff.tv/news/phone/imho/this-is-the-smartphone-of-the-future
Concept phone: http://itechfuture.com/concept-of-a-smartphone-morephone/
CNET news article: http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-57578982-85/smartphone-innovation-where-were-going-next-smartphones-unlocked/
Google glass page at Google+: https://plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts