Larry Garfield looks around at the increasing feature set of modern do-everything mobile phones, and is left with just one question: Um, why?
"Feature creep" is not a new concept. It's a chronic illness that afflicts most product categories that has become "commoditized", that is, cheap enough and standardized enough that everyone and his brother is able to build and/or own one. In order to justify profitable margins, therefore, manufacturers have to keep adding "new and cool" features to the product in order to get people to buy it, or even worse replace their older and still perfectly-fine products. Technology fields suffer from it more than most markets, and anything software-related in particular since adding new features is so incredibly easy (although doing it well is not). Even a cursory glance at the market for the past year leads to one clear conclusion: Mobile phones are a commodity.
The first sign was the camera phone. What marketing agent came up with the idea of putting a cheap and barely functional digital camera into an otherwise decent phone I don't know, but he started a deluge of new phones with photo-centric designs. Of course, the pictures that result are in most cases barely useful. 0.3 megapixel with no flash and no optical zoom makes for poor pictures in general, but in most cases they cannot even be transfered anywhere for storage conveniently, only sent via MMS to other phones (at why-bother prices) for a giggle. Megapixel cameras are starting to appear, but those are still only barely useful compared to a real camera. Even the few 3 megapixel camera phones (Asia only, of course) still suffer from a split personality, as cameras and phones have different ergonomic needs.
Next was ubiquitous color screens. Sure, color is clear and pretty. But at what cost? Color screens cost more than grayscale, and draw more power, and all they really add is the ability to play simple games and see lame camera phone pictures. OK, perhaps that's a bit harsh. But why does a phone with a 120 pixel wide screen need 260,000 color support? Many desktop computers don't run with that many colors. Just how much am I paying for a full color 65,000 display the size of a postage stamp for caller ID? Save me the money and I'll live with a 4,096-color caller ID postage stamp, really.
Coming up next is various forms of "e-wallet". Turn your phone into your ID card, wallet, credit card, ATM card, house key... Well, at least this idea doesn't break the form factor of a phone as much as a camera does. Just what we need, a single point of failure for identity theft. And then there's high-speed data connections. Just how much data can one realistically download to a 2-inch screen?
That doesn't mean that all new features are bad. Speaker-independent voice recognition, for instance, is a feature whose time is long overdue. Push To Talk is another feature that genuinely builds on the strengths of a mobile phone without breaking the form factor. Many talking points of newer phones, though, are solutions in search of a problem. In order to be done well, they should be implemented on a device that can actually use them, that is, a smartphone or communicator. Those devices actually have the platform, the flexibility, and most importantly the form factor, to make decent use of high-color screens, high speed data connections, instant messaging, video playback, digital cameras (with optical zoom, please?), and so on.
Then there's that weird category of hybrid devices that straddle the smartphone/communicator line, such as the palmOne Treo 600 or Sony Ericsson P900, which manage to balance advanced features with a phone-friendly form factor in amazing ways. They're hard to pin down, as sometimes they're classified as smartphones and sometimes as communicators, yet they show the most promise of bridging the gap between full-featured and phone-style form factor. Watch this space, folks, that's where the future is happening.
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