We’ve been hearing more and more about ‘superphones’. It’s such a new term that the Apple dictionary can’t quite cope with it and insists on correcting the term to ‘super phones’. But I’ve been hearing it around now and again for at least the last 6 months.
The background to ‘superphones’ is this:
You started off with your featureless feature phone, right? Next came the ‘smart’ phone because, well, it was a bit more powerful and it was basically a multimedia computer in your hand (the Nokia N95 was marketed with precisely that description). Come to think of it, ‘smart’ really meant ‘can do stuff in the background’.
Feature phones were limited to one task at a time. And when you wanted to — gasp — take a photo and have it upload in the background whilst you visited a website with the phone’s browser? That was an impossible ask on a feature phone. You needed a smartphone. Or, a smart Symbian phone, really.
[I was always tickled by the fact my N95 8GB knocked the socks off the first few generations of iPhone because, fundamentally, it could do stuff in the background — properly]
Android arrived giving us a new definition of smart. The device just asked for your Google username and password and — boom — everything on the phone was configured and ready, including your email, instant messenger and so on. Truly revolutionary, when it took decades to type your details into a Nokia, or when you had to wait for a ‘system administrator’ to sort out your BlackBerry email.
BlackBerry, by the way, was one of the original smartphones. Ever since I can remember, they’ve been multitasking with the best of them. It was fitting, then that I first saw the term ‘superphone’ at a RIM conference. They were talking about their uber-uber next generation devices running BBX or BB 10 as it’s now known. [I’m disappointed we’re going to have to wait some time — at least 6 months — to see one in the flesh.]
The term superphone is about to appear all over the shop.
If only it actually meant something more than a bigger CPU and slightly more megapixels. I worry that we’re going to have to wait for Apple to knock out their next iteration before the industry can do any serious innovation/copy.
A superphone should — in my mind — be able to wash the dishes. Almost literally. You know, it should be able to integrate with the house, the car, the shopping centre, the cinema multiplex, the train, the hotel room, the airline and so on. It should have all sorts of wickedly cool presence management along with something like Siri on-board speaking to you and understanding everything you want. It should be a phenomenal communications device.
Taking a standard 500 dollar Android device and giving it a 12 megapixel camera, a quad-CPU and a paint job and calling it a superphone… no. No, absolutely not.
You just know that this is about to happen though.
It’s a bit like various nameless networks renaming their H+ cell services ‘4G’ when they’re patently nowhere near the speed supposedly understood by the term.
I’ve heard whispers of Nokia and Microsoft being associated with the superphone term. Please, gents, please don’t knock out the Lumia X with a few more megapixels and call it ‘super’. Let’s see some serious innovation before the term ‘superphone’ is grabbed by the marketing bods and placed into the Oxford Dictionary?
I’ve had my say.
Now, bring on the slightly-slightly-better–than-a-smartphone superphones!
Nice musings, Ewan. See also my article along the same lines last year: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/12312_The_Smartphone_Spectrum.php 😎
ah hah very smart!
or should I say, ‘super’? 😉
I totally agree with your wishes for richer integration with… well… everything, really. However, to my mind that’s going to be a gradual process that will be driven by apps more than anything else. I’m therefore not convinced that there’ll be a sudden step-change in the devices that warrants a new name like “superphone”. (To be honest, I’ve never been a fan of those kinds of terms anyway. Far too wishy-washy for my liking. Where do dumb/feature/smart/super-phones and tablets begin and end? Other than creating arbitrary slices of marketshare, within which manufacturers can boast of a big-sounding chunk when in fact their share of all mobile devices is tiny, they don’t seem to have much practical application IMHO)
With respect to the kind of integration with real-world objects and machines that you describe, there’s a few hardware features might help (e.g. low-power Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, etc.) but for the most part it’s about creating some communication protocols between your phone and other gadgets (and hopefully standardising them sooner rather than later) which is primarily a software job.
It already began some time ago. IIRC my Nokia N80 (a Symbian phone) already had a rudimentary DLNA app for controlling & streaming media in the household. These days there’s all sorts of 3rd party apps to remote control/monitor various items (e.g. unlocking rental cars, monitoring electricity usage etc.) and I’m sure more will come.
I suspect that, as is typically the case, the more common uses will gradually get standardised and support for them will slip down into OS middleware layers so that future apps can easily access them instead of having to re-implement all the comms stuff themselves every time.
None of this is particularly resource intensive though (in terms of CPU, RAM etc.), so I imagine even modest “smartphones” could get this kind of functionality in the form of software updates or at least 3rd party apps in the future.
Ah genius contribution Matthaus!
One of the points I negated to discuss (that you rightly mention) was ecosystems, James — a handset itself is comparatively useless if there’s no surrounding ecosystem connecting your home, fridge, TV and so on!
“have to wait for Apple to knock out their next iteration before the industry can do any serious innovation/copy”? Seriously? …yeah, like they “invented” 3G, like they “invented” videocalling, like they “invented” multitasking, like they “invented” the notification bar…yeah, right. Newsflash from 2012: crapple hasn’t coughed up anything new for ages.
My point is that the industry seems to now wait for Apple to do things …
As much as the whole “Apple invented XYZ” things winds me up too, I have to concede that in most cases they are the first to output something in a form that customers understand and then desire.
Take media streaming for example. DLNA has been around for yonks and is present in quite a few gadgets these days (many TVs & HiFis have it now as does the PS3). How many people on the street actually realise that though? And then, even if they do and decide to try it, the experience is typically quite clunky (you have to get your head around the whole server/player/renderer/controller thing, deal with format incompatibilities and often face pretty lame UIs). Geeks like us might put up with that but your average punter won’t.
Along comes Apple then with Airplay (notice how the name is already a lot more descriptive than “DLNA”. “Airplay” – hmm, I guess that plays stuff over the air vs. “DLNA”, wtf is that??). Yes it’s proprietary. Yes it only works with Apple kit, media & apps. Yes you need to buy an £80 Apple TV to use it. But guess what, when you buy into that it “just works”. There’s no fiddly set up – just plug it into your TV and tap a button on your iThingy’s screen and off you go.
People by and large like that and are willing to pay for that. Apple gets that. Very few others do unfortunately. I really wish they did, because if there was open alternative to AirPlay that worked just as well, I’d totally buy into it.
As for dual-booting. I really don’t see that ever going mainstream. Even as a geek I struggle to see what I’d use it for on my phone, other than trying it out once or twice out of curiosity.
Aye — it’s presenting the technology in a meaningful manner. ie. 3G video vs Facetime.
Couldn’t of said it better James. I could also say that a lot of people need to make this distinction in their writing more often, if not every time. But I wont. What I feel is lacking is the “education” experience. Instead of waiting for something to be presented “that just works” why instead are people not so enamoured of the delights of learning?
I’ve posted on here, and on other mobile related sites about this, and I know that a lot of it goes to the cultural experience of learning etc, but for me it is the absolute key to a successful customer experience, a deep, fundamental, warts and all, learning experience.
I was never the brightest kid in school, and it took two attempts for me to obtain a degree, but I like to learn and understand, and I feel my appreciation for a technology type is much the better for it too. I fear this makes me part of a very small minority. For example: do you like to read the manuals for your devices, be they phone or other items of technology before you use the device for the first time? I do.
Gareth, what did you make of the iPhone manual? 😉
I’ve never had an iPhone Ewan. My friends who have one have never shown me the manual. With a jolly big smile on their face they trot out “that” line! Why? Was it not very comprehensive?
As an aside I don’t mind if the manual is not a paper one in the box. PDF via the internet is fine too. But there has to be a manual. It doesn’t have to be a War and Peace type. But it does have to be comprehensive and all inclusive.
Gareth — I’ll see if I can find an example. The manual is basically a few iPhone-box-sized bits of paper — almost like a little leaflet!