Something we've heard and talked about over and over again recently is that Nokia and others have all recognised that the future belongs to 'services and software' and that the hardware has become 'a commodity'. This is all a bit jargonistic and in this feature Steve explains these phrases in plain english from the point of view of the consumer.
Read on in the full article.
To put it in one sentence, a commodity is a product where you really don't care who made it or what it's like. With a commodity all you care about is how much it costs.
The best example of this is probably fuel, when you're filling your car up with petrol all you look at is the price on the pump.
Once all phones achieve a certain level of functionality and reliability, most people will consider them good enough for all possible needs, and the only thing people will look at is the price. If the only thing that matters is price, then the price will go down to the lowest possible level, which will make life quite hard for the manufacturers.
Some people will carry on buying cutting edge phones of course, but with each new wave of phones the majority of people will have less and less reason to upgrade, until finally only a tiny percentage will keep buying more advanced models. At that point phones will effectively be a commodity, like pocket calculators or umbrellas.
However, content will probably never be a commodity, most people wouldn't buy music or maps or videos at random. You'd usually want something very specific, possibly from a very specific maker. That's why there's a tendency to consider content more profitable in the long term than hardware.
On the other hand, will ever-easier piracy make content worthless?
"On the other hand, will ever-easier piracy make content worthless? "
I think that has a *large* part to do with the content creator and how they address their customers. Music piracy exists because the content creators weren't able to quickly identify the market and cater to it. They chose to resist digitalization of their content, and they lost.
Movies/videos are going that way, but I think they have a chance to stop it (I've found myself using Hulu and the networks' websites to stream the tv show, as it's convenient and usually quicker than having to torrent it)
So no, I don't think content will be made worthless, so long as the content creator remains open and willing to address the needs of the audience quickly.
I've been saying for ages, as the phone absorbed the camera, the mp3 player, the video recorder etc etc., so it will absorb the smartphone. i.e., as with the other things, phones will merge with smartphones and assimilate those features that are useful to it. And so the process will go on until we end up with one all consuming "digital device". And yes, of course many people will continue to buy custom equipment to play music, take photos and videos etc. But MOST people will be happy with a single converged device.
When you take a very sophisticated, open, powerful, flexible phone OS like Android - the key there being it's free, and stick an easy to use UI - basically a featurephone UI on it, and then the hardware to run all that is dirt cheap, at that point there can be no more "smartphones" - the bottom end phone has become the smartphone, and that's what all the other providers have to compete with. At that point, we're all running smartphones - the phone has eaten the smartphone. (The next thing the phone will eat is the laptop)
iPhone will trade on it's cachet and continue to be bought by a minority. Symbian/Nokia have reacted in the only way they could to survive - by becoming free and open source. And Win Mo will hopefully wither and die, or MS will have to open source it and make it free too. Being very slightly more compatible with the enterprise will only get Win Mo so far, and that's not very far at all in the grand scheme of things.
Good explanation by the way Krisse.
Guys - look can I make a plea here - we don't have to buy into naff American management speak all the time. In my dictionary a commodity is simply 'something that is bought and sold, especially a manufactured product or raw material'. So any phone is a commodity, whether or not we are in the situation where all phones do exactly the same thing. And by the way, why do we assume that we are there? Look at cars, they've been around for donkeys years now and we still choose carefully which one we want to buy.
And don't even start me on commoditisation. What sort of English is that? It's rubbish.
To ajck - let's face it - the phone will never eat the laptop. Not ever, never, never in a million years. Why? Because of the size of the screen. Have you tried working on a spreadsheet on a phone? The experience is distinctly underwhelming. For word processing, yes, it's not too bad, but for serious work give me a laptop any day.
Hi,
This posting, anticipating the end of technological advancement in the next one or two years will end up in history next to Bill Gates' famous prediction about none needing more the 640k memory, ever.
You may think that with a phone, a camera, a video recorder, and a GPS you have all the functionality (HW) you'll ever need, but I very, very seriously doubt that assertion. There are plenty of functions that a handheld device, always being close to the owner (what we now call a 'phone' will be able to do).
Just a few examples:
'RFID': I will be able to use my phone (in some markets this already happens) to make payments. Next step is (SW/Services part of it ) to store all my purchases centrally for money managent. I might also use it to open doors.
'Remote Control': I know that IR is going out from most phones, but maybe it will stage a comeback?
'Health Monitors': We already have heart rate monitors. Will you bet against other health devices making it into the 'phone'?
'Indoor GPS': GPS today only works outdoors. Someone is bound to find a way to have similar functionalities indoors (think: based on your shopping list, you are guided through your supermarket; or given some preferences, like interested in golf, and I walk in a shopping mall and I get notified about some sales/promotions in a nearby (indoors) retail outlet).
Have I missed some? Oh yes!! Please, name a few more!
IMO, the implication that phone cameras cannot get any better is not correct. The justification for this statement seems to be the megapixel count alone (shame on you 😉 ).
There are many other aspects of cameras that still cause photographers to consider phone cameras as rubbish. I'm not a great photographer, but the most obvious one to me is the time it takes to actually take a shot. This was a problem for early POS digital cameras too. I used to have an Olympus C3030, and when I upgraded to the Canon 10D, the difference was incredible. The POS digital cameras have improved a lot in the time since the Olympus C3030, not just in the metric I mention; and such improvements are only just starting to get into camera phones.
There is still a long way to go before they'll be considered serious cameras. I hope it doesn't stop at just 'good enough', and they start looking at things other than megapixels.
Oh, I agree. I just think that "improving the shot time" and even "improving the photo quality" both qualify as incremental improvements. Notice that both lines in my rough chart were still rising after the fall-off..... 8-)
slitchfield wrote:Oh, I agree. I just think that "improving the shot time" and even "improving the photo quality" both qualify as incremental improvements. Notice that both lines in my rough chart were still rising after the fall-off..... 8-)
I guess it was this line I was taking issue with :
There's no real point increasing camera capabilities, as we're already on the limit of useful sensor size (without increasing the device's form factor). I daresay that 8mp sensors will appear at some point - to be honest, simply adding Xenon flash to most 3mp and 5mp camera gets them to good enough for 99.9% of uses
You mention 'capabilities', then only talk about sensor size. Having said that, I notice you also talk about flash quality too. There are plenty of other things that could be - indeed *need* to be - improved in order for the camera phones to be considered good (or even acceptable) as cameras - and by that I mean 'good enough for someone to leave their POS at home' which is what the manufacturers of camera phone should be aiming for, I think. Even if they don't get quite there (due to the 'good enough' syndrome, perhaps), there are *some* things which should be improved.
...but, yes, I'm fairly sure you agree with this (based on your comments in the various {smart}phone shows/podcasts/etc), which was why I was surprised to see the above line in the article :|
As a reference, I'm finding my E90 to be close to useless much of the time. Not *all* the time - there have been a few times recently where it has managed to take a shot in less than several seconds and with only one press of the 'shutter release', but it was surprising when it happened which is telling enough. From your reviews/etc, I am lead to believe some of the newer cameras are somewhat better (didn't I read about a recent one which took photos fairly quickly? - which was that, I wonder).
Anyway...
Max.
I've re-read my post above and I'd like to apologise for its tone. Not my finest hour. No offence intended to ajck especially.