BY FUAD ABDRAHMAN
It is now nearly 50 years since the world come to know of a mobile phone
Through the years, the mobile phone has undergone different stages of development, with the latest being the Smartphone which works like a computer.
This new development now seems obvious; people are no longer impressed by how a gadget that can be carried in one’s pocket can carry such sophisticated functions.
Unfortunately one fact is now clear, phones have stopped developing. All we have is the continuous repetition of the previous models. Designers and innovators have run out of ideas.
With all the activity that your phone can do for you now, from giving you a direction to monitoring your heartbeat and counting the number of steps you makes on staircase, what else do you expect your phone to do for you? Your house chores maybe, but that is never happening sadly.
Phones manufacturing companies like Iphone and Samsung hold an annual event where they introduce new models, but it is clear that they often struggle to differentiate their new upgrade in the phones they have introduced a year earlier, other than size and saying that this year’s models last in water 30 minutes longer than that of last year, they have nothing new to show the world.
One of the major futures that phones have gone through is shading weight. The first made phone weighed over 2kgs but the gadgets now weigh less than 0.1kg. The sizes have also progressively decreased. Phones are slim to an extent that you can operate one with one hand while looking at the other direction and your other hand in another chores.
Phones manufactured years back and the recently unveiled ones operate using similar software. For instance, iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 have similar software and their only difference is their physical appearance.
One of the biggest headaches is that giant companies like Apple and Samsung are unable to produce batteries with longer lives.
Some may say the phone’s ultimate goal was to only have a conversation with someone on the end and this they have been serving for the past decades, but consumer appetite for incredible extra services on their phones is giving innovators headache.
Alex Cranz, a tech writer says we have reached the peak of Smartphone. There is nothing new to add.
“The only difference between them is in the minute details. This one’s water resistant, or that one has a “slot.” This one uses TouchWiz or that one uses near vanilla Android. The few phones that still excite people are the wacky ones (or the Apple ones).” She argues that phones have made tremendous advancement.
“They’re fast enough to play 1080p video without hiccups and the cameras can catch decent images in low light. Even the screens have improved.”
Even with this nightmare, phone companies are making huge profits. Last month, Apple hit a market cap of $1 trillion, becoming the first publicly traded US Company to reach $1 trillion. It generated revenue of $229 billion by the year 2017.
Tim Cook, Apple Inc boss says they woo consumers every new year, “making products that give people the ability to do things they couldn’t do before.”
“Take iPhone X, the portrait-lighting feature. This is something that you had to be a professional photographer with a certain setup to do in the past.”
