It's been three years since Apple brought the smartphone to a mass consumer market, but smartphones have actually been around in one form or another since 1993. The difference between then and now is that early smartphones were primarily used as enterprise devices and were prohibitively expensive for most consumers. But with the enormous success of the iPhone, carriers have discovered that they can lock in customers for long periods of time by heavily subsidizing their purchases of the latest and hottest smartphones. In this slideshow we'll track the evolution of the smartphone, from its humble beginnings as a clunky monochrome device to today's sleek multimedia devices capable of supporting HD video.
The Simon was the first real attempt by the tech industry to create a "Swiss Army Knife" type of phone that incorporated voice and data services into one package, as the device acted as a mobile phone, a PDA and even a fax machine (remember those?). What's more, the device even had a touch screen that could be used to dial phone numbers, making it a true pre-pre-pre-precursor to the iPhone that would come 14 years later. The downside? Well, one Simon owner describes it as "brick-like, huge and heavy." And its original retail price was (eep!) $899. If you wanted a smartphone in 1993, you were probably better off waiting 17 years and paying $200 for an iPhone 4.
Although the Pilot wasn't a smartphone, it does deserve credit for popularizing the use of mobile data by enterprise users. After all, what dot-com exec in the late '90s would dare leave his office without taking his trusty Pilot with him? As the device that started it all for Palm, the Pilot 1000 offered users 16MHz of processing power and a grand total of 128KB of memory at a retail price of $300. While this may seem laughably overpriced for such a primitive device by today's standards, at the time the Pilot 1000 was a cutting-edge device that spawned the entire PDA industry.
Now here's where we start to see something that looks somewhat like a modern smartphone. Sure, the Nokia 9110 Communicator still had a grayscale screen and no real ability to browse the Web, but it did have a creative flip-out keyboard design that served as a model for today's popular slider smartphones such as the Motorola Droid.
In the late 1990s, Canadian company Research in Motion was mostly known for its two-way pagers that were adopted by tens of millions of users worldwide. But starting in 2002, RIM entered the mobile phone market with its BlackBerry 5810 device, a phone with the ability to get e-mail and surf the Web. The major downside of the 5810 was that you needed to plug in a headset in order to talk on the phone. RIM would not release a proper headset-free smartphone until the BlackBerry 6210 came out in early 2004.
The Treo 600 was the first smartphone released by Palm after it acquired device manufacturer Handspring, which itself had been started by Palm's original founders and which had used Palm's operating system as the basis for its Treo devices. This particular smartphone featured both GSM and CDMA models and had 32MB of RAM and 144MHz of processing power. The Treo was popular in its own right, although its release marked the start of the wane of Palm's influence.
What more can be said of Apple's revolutionary device? Apple's first attempt at cracking the smartphone market was a no-doubter home run that integrated a touch screen display with the best Web-browsing experience to yet be offered on a mobile device. Three years later, the iPhone is still the device to which all other smartphones are compared.
Android's rise is fairly remarkable for an operating system that only just launched in the fall of 2007. The open-source operating system's success is even more impressive when you consider that when it debuted it was already facing a crowded field of OS heavyweights such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian. But now Google's open-source mobile operating system has become a major player in the smartphone industry. It was used on more than 7% of all U.S. smartphones at the end of 2009, more than double its market share from the previous quarter.
Although Android had been on the market for more than a year before the Droid's release, the Droid was the first major hit for the Android platform that had enduring brand recognition. The device, which was also the first Android-based smartphone to run on the Verizon network, sold more than 1 million units over its first 74 days on the market and is expected to be followed up by a sequel sometime this summer.
Sprint has long been eager to show off the capabilities of its WiMAX network, which is currently the fastest wireless network commercially available in the United States. With the release of the EVO 4G this summer, Sprint finally has a flagship device that will let users take advantage of its high-speed network. In addition to its connectivity, the phone is also notable for its striking physical size, with a 4.3-inch 800 x 400 pixel display screen and a weight of 6 ounces. The Android-based device is so big that it even features a kickstand that helps users keep it upright while they're looking at the screen.
What does the future hold for smartphones? Do you think Motorola's new 2GHz smartphone will make history? What new features do you want smartphones to add in the coming years? Let us know in the comments!
SMARTPHONE APPS
Currently, the software companies Apple and Google had developed a variety of Smartphone apps for the operative systems Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Here we present some of these apps that have the potential to improve our day-to-day lives (or at least make them more bearable and entertaining).
- Meal snap: This app allows approximate how many calories are in meal you eat. You should take a picture of food with your Smartphone and after that, the app will determine the amount calories of your meal. This app was developed for iOS.
- Fring: This app allows make calls in group or video calls in group. The max number of members of the group is four. Most Smartphone now include a front-facing camera, enabling easy video chatting--but most of these apps work well only on Wi-Fi. Carriers are slowly moving to 4G, which will enable good-quality video calling from even more places. This app was developed for iOS and Android. It is free.
- Pair share: This app allows sharing your music with other iPhone users via Bluetooth. You become the DJ, broadcasting music live to your friends. This app was developed for iOS. The demo is free and the cost of the unlimited version is US $3.
- Up sound down: This app allows put your phone on speakerphone mode automatically when you lay the phone down on a table (pick the phone back up to use the handset) or turn the phone upside down (like a microphone). This app was developed for Android. It is free.
- Color: This app allows you to create public photo albums, grouping pictures taken by people in close proximity to one another at a certain time. You can shoot video, too, and save your photos and your friends' images in a visual diary. Its problem is that it doesn’t have privacy settings. This app was developed for iOS and soon for Android. It is free.
- Zite: This app allows scour your Facebook and Twitter feeds for news, but instead of relying on friends' recommendations (as Flipboard does), the app learns your reading habits and populates the virtual magazine with content tailored to you. Zite is facing the wrath of media lawyers because it hides ads in the text parsed from Websites. This app was developed for iOS. It is free.
- Nursery rhymes: This app allows you to read a book to a loved one from anywhere in the world via an iPhone or an iPad. You read the story at one end, and the recipient can interact with beautiful graphics and listen to you at the other end. Books and reading on tablets are becoming more interactive with user-generated audio, and video could be the next step. This app was developed for iOS. The cost of this app is US $4.
- Amazon cloud player: This app allows you get 5GB of online storage for your music, which you can stream on demand anywhere from an Android phone (additional storage costs US $1 per gigabyte). This app was developed for Android. It is free.
- The daily: This app allows you get daily news and videos delivered on iPads exclusively, built from scratch by top journalists and designers. This app was developed for iOS, only for iPad. The cost of this app is US$1 per week or US$40 per year.
- Infinity blade: This app is probably the best game ever made for the mobile platform, according to a glowing review from SlashGear. Game makers are embracing phones and tablets, and better processors and chips in the devices allow for better game play. Mobile games are also becoming much cheaper than console or PC games. This app was developed for iOS. The cost of this app is US$6.
- Tw cable tv app: With this app, Time Warner Cable video subscribers can watch selected cable TV channels on their iPads over their home Wi-Fi connection. Time Warner argues that the iPad is just another screen, but Viacom is disputing users' right to watch cable TV on an iPad at home. Numerous channels have been removed from the app already. But Dish has a similar offering, and Comcast is planning to join the party. This app was developed for iOS. It is free.
- Adobe photoshop express: With this version of Photoshop Express, you can manipulate photos taken with an iPhone or iPad using simple gestures, and store your photos in the cloud. Adobe has demoed an upcoming version of Photoshop for iPad that functions a lot like a desktop version of the more full-featured Adobe software, complete with layers and effects. This app was developed for iOS. It is free.
- Iswifter: This app allows you not only to watch Flash videos on an iPad, but also to play Flash games and view Website animations (such as ads). This app was developed for iOS. It is free.
- Bing for iPad: With this app, the search engine becomes the browser, with minimalist controls. Besides tapping, you use just one touch gesture: swiping back and forth. Microsoft's Bing for iPad seems to be an active encouragement to ditch Apple's Safari (the iPad's built-in browser) and use Bing as your preferred method of searching and browsing the Web (though you accomplish the latter through search, as there is no address bar). This app was developed for iOS.
This is a summary of how the smartphones of 2015 and 2020 could change.
· More AI and speech recognition and better gesture control.
· Context awareness and more integration with sensors and other phones.
· Different display options (rollable displays, better picoprojectors and more).
· Increased processing power and better energy efficiency and management.
Two prototypes of the MIT system, both with speech interfaces, can currently be found online. One takes commands in Chinese and contains information on businesses in Taipei, Taiwan, and the other takes commands in English and includes information on businesses in Boston.
Rice University blog discusses issues related to future smartphones.
The next wave of mobile applications should be able to serve us continuously without our active engagement. Collect data, analyze situations, and provide information in situ. Many applications try to do this now but I have to shut them off for power management. If the applications can be smarter and more efficient about how this is done, then it could become more useful
Smartphones must be reconsidered to add sensing as a key function. This is because their services will increasingly rely on how well they know about the user and the user context. The platform architecture should be redesigned to embrace sensors with diverse natures, deviating from the current computing-centric paradigm. Moreover, smartphones should be able to seamlessly work with wireless sensors worn by the user, implanted inside the user, or even deployed in the environment to collect data.
Energy efficiency will continue to be critical. While emerging nanotechnologies are promising significant improvement in battery density measured by joules per kilogram, historically battery density doubles about every 10 years, a much slower pace than what we would like to have. More importantly, smartphones can only rely on passive dissipation to remove heat, unlike desktops and laptops that can use fans and even water cooling.
A digital trend looks at smartphones of 2015 and beyond
Smartphones will have the processing power of laptops. In June, 2010, DoCoMo started offering the Toshiba T-01A in Japan, a super-fast phone that uses an advanced Qualcomm chip. With these fast processors, smartphones will finally run full-blown apps such as Adobe Photoshop.
According to John Shen, the Lab Director at Nokia Research Center, the smartphone of 2015 will be able to link phones together to form a cluster where a group of phones provides PC-like processing capability.
Smartphones with built in picoprojectors exist now. Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo announced that at the end of 2011 mobile phone with built-in pico-projector Sharp SH-06C was no sale. Smartphone SH-06C has a DLP projector brightness of 9 lumens and a resolution of 640 × 360 pixels, and is equipped with a 3.7-inch touch screen resolution of 480 × 854.
Flexible, thin film displays.
There will be various technologies and options for large displays that can be rolled up.
Wearable displays in Glasses.
Wearable displays in Glasses.
DARPA is working on glasses with enhanced displays with zoom and night vision.
There are displays in glasses and there will be displays in contact lenses. There does not seem to be a shift to these kinds of displays.
There are displays in glasses and there will be displays in contact lenses. There does not seem to be a shift to these kinds of displays.
Gesture control.
Google, for its part, has added MEMS-based gesture recognition application programming interfaces to the Gingerbread release of the Android OS, which recognizes such gestures as tilt, spin, thrust and slice.
THE FUTURE OF SMARTPHONES: 2010-2015 AND BEYOND
We take a peek into the future to see what the smartphone of tomorrow looks like.
In five years, the concept of a smartphone will change dramatically. How do we know this? Just look at the last half-decade. Since 2005, the Apple iPhone emerged as a cannibalizing platform, made for loading innovative apps, designed with finger-flicking ease-of-use in mind. The rumored Google Phone not only came out in the form of a new operating system, but the actual Nexus One as well. Accelerometers, touchscreens, GPS-based location awareness – these have also all appeared in full force in the last few years and changed the market entirely.
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| Toshiba T-01A |
PC Replacements
The primary change will occur over the next few years as smartphones start behaving more and more like laptops. In June, DoCoMo started offering the Toshiba T-01A in Japan, a super-fast phone that uses an advanced Qualcomm chip. With these fast processors, smartphones will finally run full-blown apps such as Adobe Photoshop – and not just with the limited features offered in the current Photoshop app. There are already signs of other forthcoming power apps on the horizon as well, including tools that can handle photographic effects and process large, high-res images and videos.
Nokia recently launched the N900, which it calls a mobile computer. It runs a Linux operating system and can multitask like a MacBook. In 2015, these powerful laptop replacements will provide true multitasking where you can run Spotify to stream audio, chat over an IM client, process EXIF data for a massive photo collection, and even play World of Warcraft all at the same time.
Augmented Reality
Connected Devices
The dream of fully connected, location-aware devices will finally come to fruition. This is more than just a simple Bluetooth dump between business phones, but a full data exchange – say, sending all your favorite apps over Wi-Fi to another smartphone, as well as every movie you have ever download, and all of your music.
“Your phone is likely to be situational and contextually aware, and present information to you accordingly”. “The phone — and the cloud-based server side intelligence behind it — will know you, your location, your social networks, and your preferences in food, media, and communication. It will predict your next moves. The multi-trillion dollar question is who enables it and controls the sources and uses of information.”
Location awareness will further lead to several other innovations. Phones in 2015 will know when you are near a McDonald’s or Starbucks and offer to pay your bill.
According to professionals in Smartphone, the Smartphone of 2015 will go even further: You will be able to link phones together to form a cluster where a group of phones provides PC-like processing capability.
Gaming Expands Even Further
The games also point to a trend where mobile gaming gets much more graphical and gamers will be able to connect with each other for multiplayer shootouts, albeit with not just one or two players, but rather a roomful of 32 gamers all at once.
Moreover, with faster processors and faster carrier service, gamers will be able to connect in a multiplayer match involves high-resolution graphics, co-operative play with two players on screen at the same time, incredibly fluid game play mechanics, and much more realistic console-like sound. At the heart of this new technology: Faster networks and ubiquitous connections for anytime gaming with anyone.
“The chips running the device will be highly efficient,” says a professional in smartphone. “Like today, your phone will have sufficient memory to store oodles of information, but it will also be connected to the Internet in an ambient way through whatever network makes the most sense.”
Social Networking and Connections
In 2015, there will be no need to use Facebook on a computer anymore, because your connections will occur in real-time when you meet people in person, swapping contact info, photos, and even personal details in an instant.
And what is the ultimate conclusion? Once these faster, more location-aware, service oriented phones emerge, the PC will quickly become secondary. As such, the smartphone of 2015 and beyond won’t just be an essential traveling companion – it may be your one-stop connection to the computing world at large.
