Smartphones – Whatphone helps you compare
Whatphone has its tongue in its cheek as concerns strong views on either the Android or Apple Smartphone phones.
Team members routinely debate both points of view – Android’s better for this reason, Apple’s better for that.
The truth is that the team is passionate about not one Smartphone.
We want to help you compare operating system, technology ecosystem, device, form factor and, for that matter, telecommunications Service Providers ( Optus, Vodafone, Virgin Mobile, Amaysim or Telstra. )
Smartphones – Informed choice between options.
Aussies love a battler. Who doesn’t like to go for the team who’s catching up. It seems like the right thing to do in a fair contest to let the underdog gain the ground back. Perhaps that’s why the weight of articles on Whatphone to this point have related to the rising Android platform.
That said, serious consideration of Smartphones cannot ignore the impact of the Apple iPhone, although, despite what people might think, the Smartphone was taken to a new level by Apple but existed for sometime before the iPhone redefined the market.
Smartphones – evolution
The rate of technological change has been enormous over the last 2 decades in every area. It would be easy to make an argument that it is most evident in the evolution of Smartphones.
Looking at progress as judged by the evolution of mobile devices, you can see Moore’s law ( a suggestion that processing power will double every year for the same cost ) working right in front of you.
Smartphones all began
It’s hard to imagine now, how things were, back in the early 1990s, in the days that offices were just getting used to having email as a standard and thanking their lucky stars that they didn’t have to fax everything.
It was around then that companies like Palm ( Palm Pilot ) and even IBM ( with a device nicknamed the ‘Simon’ ) started producing black and white touch screen mobile devices.
Capabilities varied but included on some devices the ability to make calls and on others, PIM ( Personal Information Management- diary, tasks,email ) capabilities.
When you think of it, that is very little short of amazing, given the technological capabilities at the time !
Smartphones and their mutants
As with all evolutions, the evolution of the smartphone is marked by multiple ‘mutations’ – experiments in form, some of which worked and some of which died after short, ugly lives.
Smartphones – first use
In 1997, the first use of the word ‘Smartphone’ in a commercial release came about. Only a few hundred of the ‘Penelope’ device are shipped by Ericsson but the word started to become more and more commonplace from then on in.
In 1998, the Nokia Communicator ( 9110 ) was launched. A phone which opened to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard and a variety of linked capabilities although it wasn’t great at surfing the web, the concept of using a mobile phone as much for data as for voice had entered the psyche of, particularly the business traveller.
Later, in the year 2000, the Ericsson 380, derived from the Penelope is actually marketed as a Smartphone. They were small, plastiky, the browser experience wasn’t good and they used the Symbian OS but the phone cleverly adapted itself to the user’s needs with a hinged keyboard.
The pace started to gather. In 2002, the Palm Treo was announced. Actually, in that year, there were several Treo device releases with credible build quality and user interfaces.
Smartphones – the BlackBerry contribution
BlackBerry also started to get noticed. In 2002, the benchmark BlackBerry device was the 5810. Still monochrome, lampooned users were accused of holding burnt toast to their heads but started to feel connected with real time ( push ) email and very basic web surfing capability.
There was, however, a real sense that ‘something was happening’ to phones to take them in a direction beyond just voice, although at this time, users were still very much business focused.
The very next year, you could see the Smartphone monkey stand up and become what we recognize today as a man. The Treo 600 had a full colour screen, fitted in your pocket and actually looked like a Smartphone – with icons and everything.
BlackBerrys got colour screens. From selling a few hundred a month, the company I was working at, in 2005 started selling more than a hundreds of thousand, again, mostly to business customers.
Smartphones – The Iphone 3G – a New Era
Then in 2007 came the iPhone 3G. A phone which not only defined a market and became a benchmark to which others are still compared today but which put the user at the forefront of all manufacturers’ thoughts.
In 2005 / 2006, I was working in data services for an Australian telecommunications provider. I remember vividly having conversations about how we could increase peoples usage of data.
We were asking the wrong question – we should have been focused on improving the usability of our product range and letting data usage follow.
As usual, Apple ignored the conventional wisdom and blazed a new trail. Their new device had a browsing experience which was not just an enhancement of current capabilities – it completely redefined the industry and, to this day astonishes and amazes those who use it.
Where BlackBerry and some of the other manufacturer’s devices had taken Smartphones to only consumer ‘geeks’ ( including me ! ) the IPhone connected the mass market to a data phone with an emotional bond. People could take the internet with them and feel good about it.
Competition is healthy, as we’ve said.
Google saw the opportunity in mobile and helped the industry take advantage of it with their investment in the Android Operating System, something which has been used by many of the major device manufacturers since and, as we’ve seen in other Whatphone articles, is now the fastest growing segment of the market.
The state of the art now is LTE / 4G speeds, hi def screens, automatic face recognition, on device video editing. These are technologies which are amazing to those of us who work in the industry but which would have seemed unimaginable 20 years ago back when the first Smartphones popped up.
Smartphones – imagine what’s next.
Phones the size of a blood cell, imprinted in your body which connect you wireless to each other and the internet. It sounds like science fiction but is it really beyond comprehension when we’ve seen such innovation from the world’s largest equipment manufacturers ? Who’s to say.
What we can be sure of is that Whatphone will always be here, trying to make it easier to choose from the array of the best Smartphones on the market – the phones everyone buys.