A much pronounced terminology in our present mobile market is the word “Smartphone”. Unfortunately, not everybody understands its real meaning.
The moment we mention it, somebody is going to hoot, “I know, it's an iPhone, right?”. Not to blame anybody but that is how it has been marketed, for smart phone is a very generic mould given to a complex hearing device.
Bridging platforms
On Google-ing it, I came across an interesting definition: “A Smartphone is a mobile phone offering advanced capabilities, often with PC-like functionality (PC-mobile handset convergence). There is no industry standard definition of a Smartphone.” The key thought is held within the braces.
Smartphones are meant to bridge the barrier between PC and mobile. And here comes the biggest fallacy of eras. Almost the whole last decade this meant, a cheap imitation of your Windows inside an awfully small screen with a gigantic toothpick called stylus.
Poking on every possible angle to just stutter open the tab equivalent of our start menu in Windows XP and try playing solitaire in it. Not to forget the Blackberry, unfortunately neither did have it and the ones who had it got stuck to it fascinated by its mail server.
But there grew the sowing seeds of the current generation advancement only to be just hindered by the giant sites like Facebook and Twitter.
For now, the one qualifying factor in a mobile for the young generation is to have access to Facebook in the phone. Let's not forget our initial thought, convergence!
Looking at the present trend though may not be so prosperous towards advancement; mobile phones are going through that transition from being a vendor specific black box to a user customisable jukebox. Yes it is true; Android is going to rule the market just for this one reason.
It gives the customer the flexibility to decorate their customisable ROM (namely cyanogenMOD, XDA, MIUI etc.) and at the same time share it with the others in the community.
To support my argument, you will not be astonished to know that every quarter there is a minimum of 100 mobiles getting launched powered by Google.
Every vendor has now got only a small area of hoarding their market value by providing hardware infringement for jail breaking the phone (it's the act of rooting your mobile to access the core software), which are also on the verge of getting abolished for its well known to them they can't sustain longer with such a policy.
Power to you
So what difference does this make to us as a simple layman with very little buying power? It's simple — as an individual we get options and the power to customise our requirement.
Similar to the PC revolution, we will get access to individual hardware required to build our mobile and the vendors' can have a hold only on the software part (Operating System).
We would get to design our phone. And this is where Google is cashing in; it's a company that believes in open source and that's the reason they support this revolution.
They have launched special developer's mobiles just to help anybody willing to grow android. Their NEXUS (NEXUS one and NEXUS S) product is a testimony to Google's ideology towards developing a common product by not hoarding talents but by providing opportunity to anybody interested. Samsung is trying to do just that but the only difference is they have entered the market late and already people have gotten familiar with a better product in the name of android and they find no reason to shift to Samsung's BADA market.
This revolution is heading towards a bright future in the mobile world by bringing out better mobiles that shall one day throw the PC away, just like PC did throw the typewriter and the latter the pen over the generations behind us.
I'm a proud owner of Nexus One myself!
Some links to help you understand this thought:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One
>http://www.xda-developers.com/
Bharadwaj is a Systems Engineer with Areva T&D India, Noida.
