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 

How would you design a smartphone for Neanderthals?

If you have been in the software industry for a while, it is likely that you know about famous questions that are supposedly asked in Microsoft Interviews. Questions like ‘How would you move Mount Fuji?’ or ‘how would you design Mr. Bill Gates’ bathroom?’ are so publicized that there are popular books that are written entirely on Microsoft interview questions. Imagine yourself sitting in one such interview and the interviewer throws the question nonchalantly to you. Now that Microsoft is seriously investing to establish itself as serious Mobile Operating System player [marketing campaign for Windows 8 in so advance shows how serious they are!], you better be prepared to expect such questions.

Smartphone for Neanderthals, a species that got extinct 30,000 years ago?? What would a species that barely might have learnt to speak [even that is debatable], do with an advanced communication device like smartphone in a world where the most advanced technology perhaps was about making a stone axe!

While they may be perfectly legitimate questions, you also know that, putting them across is not an option. It is the interviewer who gets to ask questions and only right that is given to you as an interviewee is to answer them sincerely.

Since the interviewer did only ask about handset device, you assume that interviewer already has some kind of teleporting technology and also the right to erect wireless towers going 30,000 years back in time. Your job at present is to decide about the form-factor and necessary functionality that would be useful to Neanderthals.

So you start jotting down few artefacts that you know about Neanderthals.

1.  Neanderthals are not Gorillas, they are almost like us, so they can learn faster.
2.  Neanderthals had no script, which means no SMS.
3.  Would they know numbers?  Very unlikely so no number keypad is needed, in fact no keypad is needed.
4.  How would they identify each other? Visual cue should work, so the contact book would simply have images of different people.

Wow, that is good progress and in just a matter of minutes! You mentally pat yourself. In fact you now have started enjoying the exercise. 

Those artefacts tell you that your form factor design should be very simple and mostly visual. That means you need two powerful cameras: one for watching the caller and the other for capturing the environment. Will it be confusing to use two cameras? You take a mental note that you will revisit that later. Next, you need a large LED display, may be a AMOLED, that gives bright pictures but also is more flexible and sturdy. It also will double up as touch screen where any visual cue can be treated as a clickable object. Each visual object will have a sound profile so that communication is closer to their senses. Poor Neanderthals do not have alphabets or numbers, right?  So the device will look like a large rectangular tablet so that it is easy to hold in hand. Powerful microphone and speakers should be fixed on that.
What about battery recharge. Since neanderthals would not have any electrical charging facility of their own [except those that would be installed by the interviewer], you decide that you will equip the device with high-density thin solar-frame on the back and side faces of the tablet.
Now that you have decided on the form factor, you realise that two digital cameras, preferably with a wide-angle and auto-zoom lens, would be useful, one at the front and the other at the back of the display. Both would capture and transmit the feeds simultaneously, so no control is needed. It would in fact be a videophone. Caller will see the feeds coming from the receiver while the receiver will see the feeds from the caller.

Okay, good so far! Wait a minute, didn’t the interviewer mention, ‘smart’? He definitely did but what does it entail to make this device smart?

Your geek friend’s face flashed in your mind. With a few exceptions like when is sleeping or is in toilet, he spends almost all his time with his Android smartphone. His facebook updates (accompanied with photos and video captured in his smartphone camera) come almost every 30 minutes and updates include the most mundane things like how his pet dog licked his face in the morning or what he is taking for breakfast or how he showed his affection to his girlfriend in the café last evening to more esoteric stuff like how he realized that he is a genius. His phone is practically his all-weather companion, a kind of surrogate for a living friend who listens to him all the times without talking back and fills his personal space which otherwise is almost devoid of any human touch. You felt you have hit a streak of discovery. Neanderthals inhabited a world that was psychologically similar to your friend’s world: cold, isolated, paranoid. That tells you that they would have similar need for exhibitionism and emotional warmth, although they would not have internet or facebook.

So you deduce that smartness for a communication device in this world would necessarily entail a capability to communicate emotionally; the device must not only be 'always on and connected’ it also must be able provide a sense of emotional presence. It should be able to sense his mood and reciprocate with empathy e.g. when he is emotionally down, the device automatically would pick the video of his most pleasant experiences in the past and play them for him, or when he is afraid, it should assess the situation and suggest him possible choices and/or play some visual cues which can help him regain his courage. Based on his physiological condition and weather condition, suggest him to take shelters, pick certain herbs or wear clothes. All these are in fact technologically possible, they require few more sensors like temperature, humidity, around a terabyte of space for data storage, an application that maps facial experession and voice cues to emotional artefacts and a sophisticated analytics engine which will sift through past and present data feeds in real time.
Once such a phone is built, it will also become the smartphone for the facebook+ generations. This capability will convert the existing smartphone into a really intelligent personal companion gadget in addition to its present use for mobile communication, entertainment and online gaming.
However, it is more likely that data storage and large part of the analytics will transition to a computing cloud infrastructure maintained by the Operating System provider. This strategy, for example, is already adopted byApple for its iPhones with Siri and other apps.

You confidently finish your exposition. Your eyes did not miss the appreciative smile of the interviewer. So, you ask, “If I may ask, why Neanderthals?”

The interviewer magnanimously obliges, “Could any other way drive the point better?”

You acknowledge that he has a point there. Genesis of technology for future lies in understanding the basic human needs that remained unchanged through cycles of evolution for almost a million years.