by Jim Venable
5. November 2010 00:56
Seeing all the excitement surrounding smartphones and the capabilities these gadgets bring leads me to think that the future of the feature phone is looking a bit bleak for a couple of reasons. With much higher margins that handset manufacturers can garner by selling a smartphone versus a standard feature phone, it just stands to reason that the companies will go where the money is. The smartphone has all the bells and whistles that consumers want, or at least, think they want. I have both a feature phone and a smartphone and haven’t powered up the feature phone is about a year. The last time I did just to make sure the battery had a charge; I couldn’t remember how to use it. It wasn’t intuitive at all and seemed so antiquated, clunky and cumbersome.
The technology being designed into these future smartphones is extraordinarily impressive, to say the least. There is more compute power available to the average smartphone user than there was to the astronauts in the Apollo 11 space program that took them to the moon; by an order of magnitude. We’re talking about a thousand times the bandwidth. The average desktop of the 1990’s had only 1/100th of the performance of the current smartphone.
When I was at the recent CEATAC show just outside Tokyo last month, I noticed almost all of the attention in the handset manufacturers’ booths was on their smartphones and their poor feature phones languished in their little cradles untouched. There was even a 3D smartphone prototype from Sharp that had a queue of about 100 people waiting patiently in line to see it; no special glasses needed. I managed to get a surreptitious peek. While still needing a bunch more work, it was impressive.
Performance will continue to advance in leaps and bounds while costs will continue to decline squeezing out the feature phone market segment. The smartphone of today will become the mid-range replacement of the feature phone tomorrow. What will take the place the current smartphone at the higher end will be yet another more powerful and more capable device, combining functionality and features only dreamed about today: more location-based applications, augmented reality, 3D graphics, 3D gaming, 3D touch screen, HD everything and connectivity to anything. These new devices will need advanced memory sub-systems that can handle the bandwidth demands to make such applications viable. Serial Port Memory Technology will be right there keeping up with the ever-changing requirements of the mobile and consumer electronics market.
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