The Mobile Race

The mobile spec-hardware race continues apace, if anyone wondered what improvements could be made to smartphones, then recent rumors show just where it’s headed. It was only this year that we saw the introduction of a 720p display in a Sony Xperia smartphone and now HTC has gone ahead to release a 1080p smartphone display beating Sony and the likes of Samsung as they look to launch a new flagship early next year or maybe with the 2012 Nexus.

It is no secret that 1080p displays could be the new norm in the flagship race next year. However, how far can the boundaries keep being pushed before the difference to the average consumer becomes negligible?

We already have a 5-inch 1080p JDI display with 443PPI pixel density. The 342PPI pixel density display of the Xperia S is one of the best we’ve seen and unless you have your nose to the screen you’d never really need anything better. I still can’t wait to see how such a high PPI and 1080p works and the toll it has on the battery life.

How many of you run anything greater than a quad-core PC? We’d imagine it is very few. It will be the same for the mobile market – yes, the chips will get more efficient, fabrication sizes will decrease – but we doubt we’ll see more processor cores and higher clock speeds will massively increase until battery life is much improved. I am glad that the RAM has reached 1GB and I can’t wait for the day when it will be at around 2GB (I know Samsung you working on this) for that is what really matters and not the number of cores.

Moving on to cameras, smartphone camera technology is fast rivaling point-and-shoots and for many people photos taken on their smartphones are ‘good enough’. Yes we complain about noise, sharpness and most of us would love to see a return of a xenon flash on a Sony Xperia. But let’s get real, most people don’t print huge canvases of their smartphone pictures. They’ll use it to share onto social media sites and that’s it.

There is one fundamental area where smartphone technology has stood still and that is battery life. Whilst we’ve seen seismic shifts in most other components of smartphone technology, the same cannot be said of battery life. Back in the day, battery usage on feature phones weren't even a consideration for most people as they just lasted for days. Fast forward to today and it’s generally accepted that you need to charge your phone every night. This is never a good experience for first time smartphone users and the old timers but soon you learn how to walk around with your data cable and how to manage the screen brightness just to get maybe half a day of usage. Newer display technology and battery tech are critical hence need for more R&D and collaboration.

We’d love to be able to get even two solid days usage out of a modern smartphone – including tethering, GPS, watching movies etc. We’re a long way off this for now, but this is what we long for most. So for us, the answer to our title question is an unequivocal no. Whilst there are some areas of smartphones reaching diminishing marginal rates of return (displays, chipsets), there are others that can still be much improved with battery life heading the list. We’d still like a xenon Xperia too if Sony is listening.

So over to you, have you reached smartphone fatigue? Are new mid-range smartphones good enough for your day-to-day use? Or do you still find excitement at the very cutting edge smart phones?

Lets look at the OS platform and you will realize it is a 3 horse race but we got breed breeds and mules and that is what matters when it comes to sales and customer retention and satisfaction,  irregardless of the supper fast hardware we have around...