We get told – and tell people – an awful lot that smartphones are the way of the future.
Well, all and good for the future. Smartphones are speedy, smooth, useful, and pretty – I'm sure we're all glad to know that they are here, for now at least, to stick around. But aside from hipsters and businessmen trying to prove they're ahead of the curve, what does it mean now that smartphones are the way of the future? How does the recognition of smartphones as a device that are going to make a long-term impact on our society, culture, and planet affect the way people live and work today?
There's a lot to consider, from the inherent assumptions around smartphone usage to the people who make their living off making guesses about the future to the hackers who make their living off your living.
Let's take a look at some of the ways that smartphones and the future have changed the present.
The Good
Smartphones are a booming industry. They're also an industry that, more often than not, supports others. For all the outcry about the internet and electronics destroying our publishing/music/press industry, it's probably time to accept that the world changing isn't a tragic event. (For the record: people protested the printing press in just the same way.)
It's fun to speculate about how the publishing industry will seek to keep their hardcopy book sales high now that eBooks have arrived on the scene (maybe by making pretty books that we actually want to own, as opposed to the ugly paperbacks cluttering our shelves). That's neither here nor there, though; let's focus instead on what smartphones and tablets do for the industries they are supposedly destroying.
While newspaper sales decline, 746, 000 Australians downloaded newspaper and magazine apps to their smartphones or tablets, according to research from Nielsen. Internet browsing via smartphones surged 83.9%, with major news websites still a major destination for smartphone browsers.
Amazon announced that their eBook Kindle sales now eclipsed the sale of all of their paperbacks. A statement released announced that "for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books." The result? Authors should be getting more royalties more often, and smartphones and tablets have hopped on the craze with new apps and easy eBook accessibility.
It may be difficult to work out the last time you bought a physical CD, but iTunes sales are now over 88% of the legal download music market in the US. While it may be hard to find reasons why a dominant in the field is a good thing, it's undeniable that iTunes have given us a working model of how online music sales can be successful and put a stop to some of the overwhelming online piracy. If you want to support your favourite band, though, probably it's best to go to their show.
Online retail in Australia is booming. For the first time we are beginning to see a significant change not just in people using international services – like Amazon or Etsy – but in Australian owned and recognised brands taking their profits online. In the Online Ratings report from Nielsen, JB Hi Fi, The Good Guys, and Dick Smith showed positive growth online between October and December 2011. Customer electronics sites have grown by over 50%, and much of it is due – unsurprisingly – to smartphones. Neilsen Managing Director Matt Bruce said; "What we find is that when people own smartphones, be they iPhones or Android devices, they will use the internet on their mobile a lot more... The traditional retail brands are still staying strong online but across the board, we saw a big increase to retail websites from Coles and Woolies to JB Hi Fi and Harvey Norman."
Photo credit: The Australian.
PRESENT TENSE!
What do all these figures mean now, besides the fact that we're using these products?
Well, there's a whole range of other jobs focused on predicting the future – particularly, advertising and marketing departments. And some of these people are frustrated at the technology people are using to come up with such statistics.
Amnesia Razorfish co-founder Iain McDonald pointed out that the difficult with relying on publishers to provider user data is that "a lot of the stuff we see tends to be quite top-line, such as the number of unique browsers. The data on its own is meaningless, the interpretation of the data is everything." He added that the "problem with apps now is that you don't know whether you're duplicating your audience. Your 2000, 000 app views may be the same as your 200, 000 web views."
People are using their smartphones for a range of different things, and advertisers want to work out who and how. Sometimes this searching is explicit, as with the Flinders Street Wi-Fi which is free but requires its users to enter some basic details about themselves first so they can be catered to with appropriate ads.
At others times, the media and marketing departments of anywhere are going to turn to raw data, and analysis will have to become more sophisticated in providing companies with knowledge of how well their virtual stock is going.
It also means that app developers are working hard to supply you with the right app for whatever you need; be it language classes, shopping lists, ebook readers, music players, or anything else you can possibly think of. Take a look at some of our favourite apps, or go play in the Apple App Store or Android Market.
The Bad
Smartphones may seem like little genies in our bags sometimes; tap the magic lamp and get whatever wish we want. We use them for everything – communicating, entertaining, creating, and... shopping.
The rise of smartphone shopping has been well documented. In Australia, where more than 37% of the population has a smartphone, online banking and shopping is huge, with PayPal reporting mobile transactions increasing by 25% every month. All of this is something that can only make daily life simpler and more enjoyable, but it also leaves a lot of bank details floating around online.
And always ready to snatch up those details are hackers and cyber thieves. There has been a reported rise in the instances of phishing, where online bank details are stolen. A particular security concern has been Android's free-for-all app market, where Lookout, a mobile security firm, found 1000 malicious Android apps last year. Downloading a bad app can be an invite for a stranger into your bank account.
PRESENT TENSE!
It's this danger with smartphones that has caused all the talk around smartphone security of late that you might have seen.
Vodafone has put out a program offering Android protection for $3/month – developed by the same people who created PC protection program McAfee.
But Google have also been working on a screener of their Android Market – the Google Bouncer.
It will be interesting to see what new forms of protection people work on. For now, make sure that you're staying safe online – use your common sense and be careful about where you giveaway personal details.
The Ridiculous
As smartphones integrate their way into our culture, so too do those cringing bits of culture we can laugh or cry over. The thing to remember is that "smartphones being the way of the future" has had a direct cultural impact now, and we will only see more of it as Australia's massive smartphone market grows.
It's also interesting to consider the impact this many pieces of plastic and metal floating around the world, and ways we can address waste now.
PRESENT TENSE!
UK company SecurEnvoy has coined the term nomophobia. This utterly etymologically incorrect phobe is a fear of losing or being without your mobile phone. SecurEnvoy conducted a study surveying 1000 people in the UK and found that they may be nomophobes.
They found that nomophobia was prevalent amongst 70% of women and 61% of men, and that it was especially rabid amongst 18-24 year olds, 77% of whom confessed to the imaginary phobia.
No word yet on whether a fear of the lack of speedy internet service will also be given a diagnosis, nor whether any official apology and reparations to the Oxford English Dictionary will take place.
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In other news, US technology giant Cisco Systems has predicted that by 2016, mobile devices will outnumber humans, with more than 10 billion mobile-connected devices versus the estimated global population of 7.3 billion. Vice president of product and solutions marketing at Cisco Suraj Shetty also predicted a rise in membership of the "Gigabyte Club... [mobile users] each generating more than one gigabyte of mobile data traffic per month".
At the end of 2011, there were 7 billion mobile-connected devices like smartphones, laptops, and other portable gadgets across the globe.
What does this mean for us now? Considering environmental impact and some of the conditions in factory plants in China – where most of these mobile devices are manufactured – it may be time to try and cut down our consumption, or at least attempt a responsible disposal of all products. Take advantages of non-for-profit organisations and charities who organise for the safe and environmentally friendly destruction or recycling of old mobile devices. Or instead of giving your kids, nieces, nephews, and/or cats new products of their own, hand down your old devices when you upgrade. The environment will thank you for it.
If you want a jetpack into the future via smartphone, have a look at some of the plans available for some of Australia's favourite smartphones: the Apple iPhone 4S 64GB, the Apple iPhone 3GS 8GB, or, to try something different, the brand new HTC Velocity 4G.
To talk about new plans for your current phone, or if you're wondering how to sign up for a plan that will include a new phone, give us a call on 1300 850 518.