Will our mobile phones continue to evolve at the rate they have done over the last fifteen years? Most technology sort of runs out of steam after a while. Computers today aren’t really much better than they were five years ago, for example. Televisions haven’t particularly improved for about ten years. However, there are some reasons to believe that mobiles have a bit more scope for improvement than those things.
Like all the other recent posts, this piece first appeared in the Nokia Conversations newsletter.
I remember the day in (I believe) 2002 when one of my colleagues arrived in the office with one of the first mobile phones with a colour screen. It was the Nokia 3510i. A crowd of us gathered in awe of its one-inch, 12-bit colour display. He then stunned us all by reading out the latest headlines from the BBC, courtesy of the GPRS WAP browser.
Immediately, all our monochrome devices — the standard office issue was the Nokia 3310 — looked like steampunk antiques, relics of a much earlier era.
That’s how it is with technology, particularly if you work in the sector. The new minimum specification seems to have a screen larger than 3-inches, an 8-megapixel camera, gigabytes of storage and a processor that could outplay Deep Blue. Next year, it will respond to thought commands and project a four-metre holographic display. The year after, phones will have become sentient beings and they’ll be telling you who to call.
Or will they? Not the robot uprising thing, but the idea that phones will become ever more powerful devices. Sometimes I am sceptical. There surely comes a point where further improvements actually become gimmicks.
In my opinion, for example, televisions stopped evolving usefully quite some time ago. The innovations in recent years — 3D, yet more speakers, screens bigger than your wall — probably appeal to a lot of people, yet for me, don’t add a lot to the core proposition of watching the TV. Similarly, computer keyboards, mice, desk fans, toasters, kettles and hairdryers. They’ve reached a natural end-point for improvement. People come up with new twists on these things, but they don’t really seem to take off.
The other side of this, though, the more optimistic side, is to make the point that all those things are single-use devices. Smartphones, by their definition, are converged devices. They’re a phone and camera, an entertainment console, a laptop, a television and a music system. When you look at that way, there’s still years to go, even at the breathtaking rate at which the technologies are being improved.
There’s a back-to-basics school of thought which says, “Ian, look, I’ve still got my Nokia 3310 from 2001 and it does the job.” But when I hear that, I pick up my phone, put on my headphones and watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica in HD.
image credit: Tarter Time Photography
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