Forget the netbook: The future of mobile is wearable
Bead it
Can't decide between a netbook, a smartphone, ultramobile PC or some other piece of mobile gadgetry? It won't be a decision bothering you for much longer.
According to Lee Williams, director of mobile OS organisation the Symbian Foundation, hardware roadmaps are heading in a new direction altogether - and in the not-too-distant-future too.
"The types of products I'm seeing are interesting because they're not netbooks and they're not what anybody would call a smartphone," he told silicon.com.
So what is this vision of mobile's future? Not hardware that can be held or carried, says Williams, but "wearable" devices - which could be brought to market in as few as three or four years' time.
One such concept Williams has seen has ditched the traditional display in favour of voice controlled 'connectivity concierge'.
"When you wanted something you didn't have embedded in the device, like a phone number or even so much as theatre tickets, you were actually connected with a person in a call centre who went and made those arrangements for you," he said.
Why might such a gadget be desirable? Because current mobile hardware has serious limitations in Williams' view - from battery issues on smartphones to having to cut the umbilical cord of "presence" when you close a netbook's lid. But, more importantly, because consumers care about services not hardware, according to Williams.
"Consumers are looking at this category of products today entirely as service-delivery vehicles," he said. "So 'do you connect me with my friends via my social networking services?', 'do you connect me with and give me presence on several different networks or groups or communities at any one point in time?'. 'Can I seamlessly connect with my work circle versus my social circle versus my other life all through these products?'."
"These are all service delivery requests, I would say, and so the software is again the key," he added.
"It's becoming obvious by the day that the value proposition in the supply chain for mobile products and services is changing at a rate that I think everybody underestimates - meaning these types of wearable products, these concierge services, the irrelevance of it being a phone versus a netbook or whatever it may be is all really right around the corner not something that's going to come to fruition a decade from now," Williams continued.
What about form factor? Small, covert and/or fashionable attired is likely to be the order of the day as mobile gets assimilated into other accessories.
"Fast forward three or four or five years and… you probably just have a bead in your ear or your glasses Bluetooth into a node you have in your pocket. When you go out at night you take your glasses off and [the bead] sits in a bracelet you wear and these are the things you'll do to communicate with your friends and family and let others know you have a heartbeat in your social circles and services," he said.
Whatever devices lie in the future, there can be little doubt a lot of change is afoot in mobile right now. Writing in a research report entitled The "Smartphone" Is Dead: Long Live Smart Phones And Smart Gadgets, Forrester principal analyst Ian Fogg said: "We're transitioning from a world with arbitrary industry categories to one where we just have intelligent phones, not 'voice phones', 'smartphones' and 'featurephones'... Consumers don't understand any of these definitions. Instead, they look for the handset brand or, increasingly, the internet brands with which the handset is compatible, such as eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Google, MySpace, or Yahoo!."
The report adds: "Mobile phones are conflicting and competing with adjacent markets and devices. In the short term, no category will be killed by the mobile ecosystem in the way that PDAs were in the early 2000s but all players in these markets must revise their consumer strategies."