It’s official: the iPhone 5 is a flop. Of course, ‘flop’ is relative. Apple will sell boatloads of them and make lots of money. But their stock price has been taking a beating since the release of the phone, dropping from $702 to $550. The plunge has many explanations, but chief among them is the general ‘meh’ response to the iPhone 5. Some of the polish has come off the Apple.

Which is bad news, because it’s clear no-one else gets it. Say what you will about Apple (and its apologists), but there’s no denying that it ushered in a very different paradigm for what a mobile phone can be and do. The response from all and sundry was to do the same, but to flood the market with a wide range of alternatives, of which a handful are genuinely excellent, and to which the rest can be relegated to landfill.

But none of the outstanding handsets  on offer from Samsung, HTC and now Nokia are doing anything new. They’re just doing it better – or at least more powerfully. The iPhone 5, similarly, does nothing new over previous incarnations of the iPhone. It just does it faster, and with lighter materials.

So with even Apple in a holding pattern, who will break next to offer something truly different?

Arms Race

To be fair, not everyone should or could be a mad innovator. At a certain point, a new technology needs to play out and become ‘normal’. This period of stagnation is vital to prompting the next period of innovation – and the tiny tweaks and upgrades along the way usually open up new technological pathways. The original personal computer was an enormous breakthrough, but the general clumsiness of it gave way to the laptop. The laptop’s normalization led to people realizing that they were only half-way portable – which gave birth to the tablet.

Likewise, the tinkering going on right now with design, materials and processing power will push the development of smaller, more efficient processors; that in turn will have implications beyond the mobile computing market.

Wearable Computers

6 years ago, you might have said that the future for smartphones were full touchscreens (including software keyboards) and applications that emulated full desktop equivalents; and you’d have been laughed out of places like Sony and RIM (BlackBerry). Likewise, you might today suggest that Google’s Glasses concept, of a wearable headset that did away with the screen and projected real time data onto your eyeball, was completely nuts.

But make no mistake: the next paradigm for communications is to make it seamless. And that means putting it right into the seams of your clothes. We have systems on single chips now; soon the entire module of a mobile should be on a single plane, and completely solid state.

Once that happens, even handsets made from anodized aluminum will seem bulky. A credit card sized device could serve as the ‘computer’, or it could be stretched out along parts of your normal attire.

The actual interface will likely be a headset. In the interim. Surely a better and less awkward paradigm will come forward – but in the short term, it will be a headset. The hard part will be coming up with a silent input method – no-one really wants to be walking along and saying ‘Siri! Engage Telephone! Call Shnookums!”.

Modular Handsets

A mid way step, or alternative path, is to continue making handsets – but to make them completely modular. This means engineering the device in independent sections, and having them plug into a central, solid-state reader. The beauty of this is that upgrading or repairing a phone means swapping out a module, rather than replacing an entire handset.

A couple of reasons for this. Updates to phones are happening annually, sometimes twice a year. That means a lot of phones get passed on to less tech-hungry family members. Smartphones are not half of all the phones sold in the world (more than half in Australia), and that took just 5 years to accomplish. Soon, every actual phone will be a smartphone. That means lots of landfill – of dumbphones – and soon after that, smartphones as well.

It’s possible that the glut of handsets will ease some of the pressure coming down the pipeline, so that companies will stop making the devices in such huge quantities. But another possibility is that someone will break through with a handset that is ecologically viable, in part by allowing for incremental upgrades of features. Imagine plugging in a new camera module. Or another stick of RAM. Or swapping out the hard drive. Now imagine you could do this in 5 seconds by unscrewing or pushing release pins on your handset, rather than taking your $1000 mini computer into some semi-kosher workshop.

Device as computer

A little talked about success story from the guys at Apple is the Mac Mini. This is a Road to Damascus device, a pathway to conversion for the PC crowd. It’s a small form-factor computer, with no mouse, keyboard or monitor included. The idea is to attract people who already have all that gear, and just want the Mac experience.

We’re getting to a point now where the guts of a Mac Mini should fit in a smartphone. Meaning that when you carry the phone around, it’s a mobile device; when you sit down to do some serious work, it can change ‘profile’ to a full PC, connecting wirelessly to keyboard, mouse and monitor. Jamming a DVD in there might be difficult.

Conclusion

Someone has to move away from the current focus on Shiny Black Rectangles (SBRs) – that includes tablets. If one company does it- whether that be Samsung, Apple, Google or Microsoft – everyone else will continue making SBRs for a while. They’re not going anywhere. But someone needs to break away from the pack, the way Apple did less than a decade ago. There’s plenty of room to maneuver – it’s just a matter of someone making a brave decision.