A question you might have seen with increasing frequency over the past couple of years that, are we at peak smartphone, right. Have we hit peak smartphone? It just gets said a lot now like yeah you know the smartphones are all kind of the same. You probably think we are at peak smartphone that has all kind of features that we have till date. It seems like every new phone coming out these days is basically the same as the last one with some minor tweaks. There are no revolutionary jumps any more.
There is never a good reason to spend any more a $1000 on this year’s phone when you have past year thousand dollars phone.
Yeah, maybe we have reached peak smartphone. So, you see all this and as a guy that’s been in this smartphone world for a while, been using the latest and greatest smartphone each year. If you’re a tech guy reviewing the smartphones for a long time. You will start feeling it that we have reached the limit and the answer is Yes…but may be NO. What you’re thinking is yes what I’m right now, there are lees big revolutionary jumps in smartphones. Yes, there are less crazy never-before-seen features in phones year over year.
Yeah, it seems like the functionality and the form factor have all sort of evolved into just we all have glass rectangles now. This is what we call a mature market we’ve seen this before. You always have the seen the greatest level of change at the beginning of the curve and as you reach the ideal or peak smartphone, it sorts of down and doesn’t change that much year over the year.
But!
That’s not to say we don’t get some seriously impressive improvements every single year. So, rewinding a little will give you a suitable answer to this question.
Beginning of the Smartphone
If you look into your past the nearly early 2000s there were constant big new changes and features that were literally revolutionary. You had the first iPhone with a glass touchscreen and the first phone with the multi-touch. When you had the first time, they ever put a camera on the back and the front of the phone. You had an App Store to download apps, desktop-class web browsing, and a pocket music player. Like it was just a milestone after milestone, pillar after pillar in the smartphone world. It was more than just the new hardware features. It was what these new hardware features enabled smartphone photography, videos chat, real-time multiplayer gaming experience and the list goes on and on and on.
So, now it’s easy when you fast forward all the way to the iPhone 11 next to the iPhone 10R. It seems like they’re almost the same phone at a glance. There are all the glass rectangles all the way.
Peak Smartphone in 2020
But, if zoom that far in you start to ignore and lose track of the outer edges and peripheral that are still pushing things forward, still enabling new things. These forwards are not seeming drastic or as fundamentals as it used to be but it’s real.
For example, in the past two years, you have recently gotten ultrawide-angle lens for wide range photography and videos that don’t need a separate camera or add-on lens. You have got portrait mode, high refresh rate, new backlight technology on display that are more efficient and that reduced the latency of the interface making everything significantly smoother than it ever has.
Computational photography is another big one it’s taken major strides in the last couple years with incredible HDR, with the real-time previews combining multiple frames into one composited image nearly instantly with a single tap of a shutter button. In addition to a few new night modes photos that were literally impossible a few years ago are now just effortless on the latest phones.
- Fingerprint Readers are shifted beneath the displays.
- Wireless charging getting better.
- Wireless audio getting better with Apple Air buds pro
- 65-Watt fast chargers bring a battery from 0 to 100 per cent in just about 30 minutes.
- New smartphones are enabled by 5th generation networks
- Upgraded more futuristic user interface just like One UI on Samsung
Yeah, literally phones are folded in half now, not just like flip phones of the past but there’s a whole first generation of fitting a larger display in your pocket than you ever could before because the displays are flexible along with the devices built around them.
There is even more on the horizon that you’re looking forward to the cameras in the front going behind the display glass.
So, there are a lot of changes have been taken place in the smartphone industry from the beginning to till date. The very basic thing is how we look into that.
