It seems to be a fairly well accepted wisdom these days that smartphones are generally used more for the smart rather than the phone bit, and that they to all intents and purposes should be regarded as pocket-based computers rather than the natural legacy of the work of Alexander Graham Bell.
If I think about my own smartphone usage, I seem to spend an awful lot of time staring at them (one work, one personal), often at the same time, jabbing with my slightly oversized finger at the touch screens. I might use one or other of them as an actual phone maybe once every two days, and often (as I did today) it will be with a headset attached as I join yet another audioconference.
Which got me thinking – despite the fact that we don’t use them much as phones these days, an incredible amount of the hardware design is to make them fit a phone-like form factor with phone-like functionality. Everything from the size to the speaker and mic position, through to the sensors that know that it’s your ear rather than your finger touching the screen is inbuilt to give that “phone-like” experience that it seems few of us rely on these days.
There have been attempts in the past to make a phone in a new format. There are a couple of Nokia models from six or seven years ago (the 7600 and 7280 in particular) that tried to make a new format for the then “feature” phone. Neither seemed to grab the imagination of the general public.
The thing is that we are creatures of habit, and so if something is sold to us as a phone, we want it to fit our perception of a phone, even if we won’t use it as a phone. Truly genre-defying innovation is challenging because, ultimately, it’s difficult I guess to sell something that can’t be categorized into existing taxonomies…
mmitII 