Peak Smartphone - Why are current smartphones so boring?

Part of my daily routine consists of browsing through sites like 9to5Mac, its sister site 9to5Google, The Verge, German language IT portal heise Online, and similar platforms. Hey, any self-respecting geek has to stay up to date. Unfortunately, the reading there has been getting a bit repetitive over the last couple of years. Granted, Apple is unlikely to make any major jumps within their product portfolio, instead perfecting and smoothing out what they have, however over recent years, the Android world appears to have entered a stage of stagnation as well. In fact, most of the middle class and higher end devices look suspiciously similar to iPhones, and any changes appear highly superficial. The biggest difference lies in the software, and even there the differences will most likely be too small for most users to recognise them at a glance.

At a glance, would you be able to tell which of these two devices... 

... is which? Unless you're into smartphones, you probably won't. And that's the problem.

That wasn’t always the case. Back in the early days of the smartphone revolution, Android devices were decidedly more adventurous. While Apple went for their now iconic iPhone design, manufacturers opting for Google’s then brand-new Android OS were more “creative” and “adventurous” in their designs. I’m speaking from personal experience here, as one of these designs, the Motorola Milestone, marketed as the Droid in the US, was my first “real” smartphone. Over the years, however, this willingness to experiment has drastically diminished, leading to the apparent similarity we see today. Granted, feature phones like the HMD’s Nokia 8110 “Banana Phone” are refreshing, but they’re effectively gimmicks, and more of a wistful, nostalgic look back than a look to the future. A few years back, Google was making waves with Project Ara, a fully modular smartphone, where upgrading to a new camera or battery simply meant exchanging the model in question. I personally was hyped for it, however, Project Ara never got off the ground, and Google quietly shelved the idea. Nowadays, the only remnants of this concept are the “moto mods”, exchangeable back shells for Lenovo’s moto Z smartphones. An Intriguing concept, for sure, but with just 15 moto mods available, and three-digit price tags for a number of them, once again, this never really got off the ground. Well, at least, these mods bring back one of my favourite things about the good old Motorola Milestone: The sliding keyboard!

Call me old fashioned, but I personally miss "creative" ideas like this in my old Motorola Milestone.

And it’s not as if the competition has anything to offer, either. Symbian rightfully died a long time ago, Windows Phone, an operating system I personally really liked, was launched during the Ballmer period of the company, and as such was never developed as well as it could have been. The fact that the operating system was effectively boycotted by Google didn’t really help much either. Maybe, it’s tie-up with Nokia dragged the operating system down, as the Finnish mobile phone pioneer was at the time undergoing some real difficulties, however Microsoft never really capitalised on the potential of this partnership, which effectively gave them influence over mobile device hardware at a level that was pretty much only rivalled by Apple. The result was that Windows Phone withered and died, effectively being killed off by Microsoft back in 2017. Other competitors aren’t really in sight either, leaving us with the current effective duopoly of Android and iOS.

The future doesn’t look particularly enticing, either. Where in the past, it was a question about providing users with useful new features, such as NFC, SD card slots, or similar, nowadays the biggest concerns appear to be cosmetic, making the screen as large as possible, banishing the front-facing camera into a notch, or removing it completely. It says something about the industry when one of the most talked about “revolutions” at 2018s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the “pop-up” front-facing camera of the vivo Apex, a concept phone by a rather unknown Chinese manufacturer, or the Oppo Find X, another equally obscure device. Geez, it's almost as if the good old Palm Zire 71 never happened. Admittedly, one of the holy grails a number of large manufacturers, including Samsung, have been working on, is a foldable smartphone with a full size foldable screen. For the last few years, executives at the company have said that such a device will come “next year”. In fact, it’s become a bit like the running joke with nuclear fusion, which is always twenty years away, regardless of when you ask the question. All joking aside, given the size of many current smartphones, the ability to just fold it up when you don’t need it would wo wonders for portability and usability. I am admittedly a bit biased in this regard, having been a huge fan of the good old Motorola V3i Razr.

Combining a full size touch screen with the flawless elegance of flip phones like the good old V3i Razr is pretty much the holy grail for smartphone manufacturers at the moment.

Why is this the case? Well, from my, admittedly limited, point of view, we’ve effectively reached “peak smartphone”. When Apple launched the original iPhone over ten years ago, its staggering success effectively throttled all experiments with other hardware concepts, such as slide-out keyboards. Manufacturers saw a winning formula and raced to fully exploit it. Initially, there was still a lot of experimentation, even within the general framework demonstrated by the iPhone, and there was still a lot of technology left to try out, leading to “interesting” devices such as the Motorola Flipout. However, over time, these experiments became less and less, as manufacturers found the perfect fit for their respective devices and layouts, leading to today’s mostly homogenized smartphone market, and a limited willingness for manufacturers to experiment.

Looking forward, beyond the next 1-2 years, what can we expect from future devices? What’s the “next big thing”? Well, if were able to predict that, I would have quit my day job long ago. There are a few extrapolations that seem more reasonable than others, though. With the whole wearables sector gaining momentum, augmented reality coming ever closer to actually being usable, and that dreaded buzzword, the “Internet of Things” actually being filled with some substance to back up the hype, I have a feeling that the smartphone as such will begin to “wither” over the next couple of years, shrinking in size, and morphing from a mostly standalone device to a “hub” for wearables, AR headsets or glasses, and similar devices. As these devices become more prevalent, smartphones will effectively turn into nothing other than 4G/5G mobile routers. Advancements in voice and gesture recognition could potentially even turn the screen of these devices redundant. 

Then again, we could see the screen undergo its next radical transformation, namely the hologram revolution. Now don’t get too excited. Industry experts expect that smartphones capable of full in-air hologram projections won’t be around for another 10-20 years (nuclear fusion, anyone?). However, so called in-screen holograms, where the content displayed on the screen appears in three dimensions, with actual depth, are coming on-line now. RED, a camera manufacturer specialising in high quality camera systems for TV and Movie use, is gearing up to launch the Hydrogen ONE, the first smartphone with such a display. It remains to be seen just how useful this technology will actually be, but it certainly shines a light on one of the potential paths ahead for mobile devices. 

Of course, the “next big thing” could be something else entirely. After all, the launch of the iPhone was a pretty big surprise when it happened back in 2007, and who knows what some manufacturers might already be working on. It could very well be that an established, but otherwise unremarkable company has perfected the use concept for the next generation of devices in the same way that Apple perfected the concept for the traditional slate smartphone. Whatever it is, I’m pretty certain that most manufacturers active today won’t deliver this “next big thing”. Apple certainly won’t, at least not under the current leadership team. And you know what? They won’t have to. They pretty much wrote the book on the modern multitouch slate smartphone and created a template for all other companies to follow. Some companies blatantly copied that concept, while others tried variations on it. None were however successful in perfecting it to the degree that Apple has managed to do so. For me, the consequence is that until this next big thing rolls around, I’ll be sticking with the company that produced the last “big thing”, and went on to perfect it. Should Android regain its creativity and daring, or another company provide new impetus in the market, that could very well change.