How Smart is Your Phone?

I often get asked... No wait.... What I meant to say was... I often wish I was asked, “Why are you so interested in mobile phone technology?”. If you do make the mistake of asking me this, you better pull up a chair and cancel your dinner plans, as I have a lot to say...

I just got off the phone to my Mum who told me she’d bought a new phone today. When I asked her what she wanted to get from it she said “something to check email and take good photos”. This drove home to me more than anything else just how much our expectations of mobile phones has changed over the last few years. I'm sure Mum won't mind me saying that I remember when she was downright intimidated by computers in general, and only a few years on she now wants to read and write emails wherever she goes! :)

There’s no doubt mobile phone technology has evolved very rapidly since the first chunky analogue bricks that wealthy businessmen carried around in the early nineties. Do you remember how we used to label anyone talking on a mobile in public a wanker? Seems funny in hindsight doesn’t it?  Now days we’re all guilty of taking a call in an important place and imposing our annoying plans for dinner on complete strangers.

Like so many other advances in technology, the move from analogue to digital was the biggest leap forward for the mobile phone to make. For those that still haven’t got their head around the whole “digital/analogue” thing, to give you a brief rundown; up until this time calls where transmitted “as is” as analogue sound waves. This meant they were easily intercepted and listened in on by others, and often meant poor call quality that was susceptible to interference from other radio waves or electro-magnetic sources.

Digital transmission means that calls are broken up and compressed into digital chunks known as “packets”, where they  travel through the air as binary information (various combinations of 1s and 0s) before being decoded and assembled back into an analogue voice signal by the handset  at the other end. As well as better reception and call quality, and big savings on bandwidth (the space available where a signal is transmitted) moving to digital technology has allowed for other types of information transmission, beginning with the humble text message along with basic features we now take for granted like Calling Number Display.

With the greater speed and bandwidth the rollout of “3G” networks  has introduced (with “4G” technologies on the horizon), the mobile phone is quickly transforming from merely a phone, into a powerful portable computer, capable of any number of advanced functions.

Love it or hate it, Apple’s infamous iPhone changed our perception of the humble mobile phone dramatically. While other phone manufacturers had already released devices with technology equal or superior to Apple’s offering, the iPhone made features that were previously cumbersome and awkward to use seem simple, fun and even sexy. Driven by a large responsive touch screen, and an intuitive and easy to use interface, Apple started the wave of cool "smartphones” which can perform so many thousands of tasks, that it’s sometimes easy to forget there’s a phone under there at all.

Where Apple succeeded and others have failed was to capture the market in the same way they did with their iPods, by making a device that was more of a hip fashion accessory than a piece of technology, and had the all important “wow factor” to show off to your friends. They owe much of their success with the iPhone to the extremely well marketed “App Store”, where you can peruse thousands of 3rd party software applications that are quickly, easily and cheaply downloaded to your phone. While having it’s critics for their somewhat arbituary software approval process, it’s fair to say that with an annual revenue exceeding $1 Billion US from the App Store alone, Apple have undeniably captured the market of portable software. With over 65,000 software applications currently available, as Apple’s own advertisements say, if you can think of it, there’s “an App for that”, with software ranging from sophisticated GPS technology to the never tiresome “fart app”.

At last count I had about 90 apps on my iPhone, all of which I find “I can’t live without” in some way, when only 18 months ago my mobile phone was able to make calls, send a text, and not a whole lot else. Now with the ability to send and receive emails, surf the net on Wi-Fi or 3G, be reminded of appointments, keep up to date on Twitter and Facebook, take and share photos, watch movies, play games and find things of interest to do in any part of the world (and of course, being an iPod, listen to thousands of songs on tap) I can’t even imagine the concept of boredom any more. There’s always so much to do. Unfortunately with woeful battery life (perhaps understandably so when you consider the advanced chipsets and large bright screen) I’m lucky to get through a single day without a charge, but alas I know that my phone is just a mere glimpse of the incredible functionality that future mobile devices will deliver.

With concepts like augmented reality starting to take off, I don’t think it’ll be too far away that everyone will carry a personal computer on them that is their interface to the world. Far more than being able to merely make calls, email, or surf the net, our mobile phones will become our primary lifestyle device, able to control and pay for anything in our lives, no matter where we are. Age old publications like the daily newspaper will die away as we get all our daily information delivered to us how and when we want it. This personal computer will likely determine where we’re going, what we’re doing , who we’re doing it with, how we’re getting there and then tell the world why we’re doing it.

With companies like Google and Microsoft in the process of releasing their next generation mobile phone operating systems, called "Android" and "Windows Mobile 6.5" respectively (which unlike Apple are then used by different manufacturers on their own devices) we’re going to see some very interesting products hit the market over the next few years. More so than any other area of technology, I think that today’s phones will seem like quaint and amusing toys to us when we look back at videos of them on our portable computers ten years from now.

For further reading on this subject, I highly recommend checking out Richard Fisher’s article from New Scientist; “Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives”

If you have anything to add to this blog, please leave your comment below. I’ll probably read it from my iPhone while sitting on the toilet...