It was a big year for mobile in 2013, as it
has been for the past several years.
Smartphones took the first steps toward
becoming hubs we can use to control our entire lives. Companies became smarter
about how they use and deploy mobile devices to make their worker more
efficient. Wearable computing is still in its infancy, but 2013 brought the
first inklings of a world in which computers will be part of our everyday
attire. And the major mobile platforms have matured to the point where it takes
some real effort to identify important feature differences between them. Ubiquitous
computing is alive and well.
Let's take a look at the top 10 trends from
the mobile industry this year.
The Power Of Connecting Technologies
Two technologies this year will be integral
to smartphones' next evolutionary step: Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi Direct.
Apple, Google and Microsoft all added the
newest standards for Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth to their mobile operating
systems. And by so doing, they've opened the door to new types of apps, functionalities
and accessory devices that will make the smartphone act as the hub of your
computing world. And all because a host of gadgets will be able to talk to one
another without draining your smartphone battery.
In iOS 7, for instance, Bluetooth Low
Energy (also known as Bluetooth Smart) has enabled developers and hardware
makers to build energy efficient accessories like smartwatches, fitness
trackers and even home appliances. Apple also instituted AirDrop—the ability to
share files directly with other smartphones—using Wi-Fi Direct peer-to-peer
networking.
Android adopted some of the newest
capabilities for Bluetooth Smart in the Jelly Bean 4.3 update in July. This
so-far overlooked capability will push a whole legion of Android accessories
into the market, including smartwatches like the Galaxy Gear or Qualcomm Toq
and the Google Glass headset. The next wave of connected devices and
accessories will be managed through these wireless standards.
Wearables On The Rise
This was also the year that a nascent new
device category started to gain popularity: wearables.
The first mass market smartwatches hit the
market this year—the Galaxy Gear, the Pebble and the Qualcomm Toq. Google
Glass—Google’s Internet-connected goggles—has been stirring up interest all
year even though only a few thousand people have had access to the units.
Fitness trackers like the Nike FuelBand and FitBit were a hit among regular
consumers (read: no longer just early adopters) this year.
Rumors persist that both Apple and Google,
among others, are working on their own smartwatches. Both Apple and Google have
filed their own patents that envision how their smartwatches could work and may
have entries into the market by this time next year.
It wasn't the year of the smartwatch, but
2013 was a good starting point for all the wearable gadgets that will come in
2014 and beyond.
Carriers Change The Plan
T-Mobile should win an award this year for
changing how U.S. consumers buy smartphones. At least on the surface.
First, it did away with the two-year
carrier contract. Then it allowed people to upgrade their devices twice a year.
In short, T-Mobile introduced a much more European approach to the process by
allowing consumers to pay for devices via monthly installments—seemingly a
sharp break with the lump-sum-and two-year-contract model that had dominated
smartphone sales since the release of the first iPhone in 2007.
T-Mobile describes itself as the
“unCarrier.” That proved to be true for about a week, until Sprint, Verizon and
AT&T immediately copied T-Mobile’s new contract and monthly installment
plans. As it turns out, none of these plans really save the consumer much
money, and they still tie customers to two-year contracts.
That said, smartphone buyers do have more
choices of devices and upgrades and contracts that they did at the beginning of
the year.
Mobile Gadgets Are Cheaper Than Ever
Nexus 5 starts at $349Nexus 5 starts at
$349
Apple is now the gold standard in the
smartphone wars—literally so, with its introduction of the gold version of the
iPhone 5S. Yet Apple has proven the exception to a general rule this year,
which is that mobile devices have been getting cheaper.
The base price for an iPhone hasn't changed
all that much since 2007. A new iPhone 5S will cost you—or your carrier—a
baseline $649. The iPhone 5C cost $549. Yes, U.S. consumers can get these
devices for $199 or $99 respectively through carrier subsidies, but that
doesn’t change the actual cost of the device. The cheapest iPad you can get is
still $499 while the iPad Mini starts at $399. If you add more storage (or
cellular connectivity for iPads), the prices rise fairly quickly.
But the average cost of mobile devices is
starting to fall. International Data Corp (IDC) reports that the average price
of smartphones this year is $337, down from $387 in 2012. By 2017, IDC predicts
that the average cost of a smartphone will be down to $265.
We have seen the power of the falling
prices of gadgets in world markets. Nearly a billion smartphones will be sold
this year. The new high-end Nexus 5 from Google and LG costs $349. The new Moto
G from Motorola costs $179. These are the best examples of quality smartphones
being sold at or below IDC’s average price. Manufacturers like Samsung, ZTE,
Huawei and Nokia have all pushed out cheap smartphones intended to flood the
global market.
For tablets, Samsung has a variety of
tablets available across a variety of price points and sizes. Google has pushed
tablet pricing with the Nexus 7 at $229 while Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets
range from $169 to $379. In the future, tablet prices will also continue to drop.
Phones Of Every Shape, Size And Cost
Major manufacturers are also offering a
much broader array of devices than they used to. Nokia, for instance, has taken
its Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone and created both smaller, cheaper
versions (the Lumia 520 at $99) and advanced devices with big screens (the
Lumia 1520 with a 6-inch display) and extraordinary features (the Lumia 1020
with a 41-megapixel camera). The smartphone game is no longer just a battle of
flagship phones; diverse product lineups allow manufacturers to address
increasingly specific niches of the market.
In many ways, Samsung is responsible for
this trend. In 2011, it released 21 different Samsung Galaxy devices—from the
Galaxy Ace to the Galaxy Z. Samsung hasn't slowed down much since; it launched
23 Galaxy phones in 2013, and currently offers four different versions of its
flagship Galaxy S4.
Other smartphone competitors have taken
note and have mimicked Samsung’s approach. To a certain extent, so has Apple—it
released two smartphones this year with the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S, the first
time it's broken with its original one model per year practice.
iOS 7 As A Viral Hit
Apple usually announces the newest version
of iOS—the operating system that runs iPhones and iPads—at its World Wide
Developer Conference in June. Apple release iOS as a beta for developers to
build their apps on before the OS is officially released to the public after
Apple’s new gadgets are released later in the year (for instance, iOS 7 was
released to the public a week after the iPhone 5S launch this year).
In past years, most people that downloaded
the iOS 7 were developers of mobile apps. That changed in a big way this year.
One of the most popular stories on ReadWrite for 2013 was, “How To Download And
Install The iOS 7 Beta.” Shortly thereafter, the ReadWrite top story was,
"How To Downgrade The iOS 7 Beta Back To iOS 6 The Easy Way."
The stories were intended to be a quick
guides for developers, but instead attracted a huge audience looking to get a
preview of iOS 7. Websites that sold access to the beta cropped up all over the
Internet. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people were using
the iOS 7 beta before Apple officially launched it for the general public.
Layered software design in iOS 7.Layered
software design in iOS 7.
This viral phenomenon proved to be a fairly
large problem for Apple and iOS. Beta versions of operating systems are not
meant for a wide audience because they can be bug and crash prone, eat
inordinate amounts of battery life and make devices generally unusable. iOS 7
is the biggest jump the operating system has taken since the iPhone was
released in 2007 with the new “flat” design along with 1,500 new application
programming interfaces.
A conversation with testing platform uTest
said that their data showed that iOS 7 had almost twice as many bugs as
previous beta versions of iOS. With all of the public attention to the beta,
those bugs caused a lot of problems for casual users who didn't have the means
to troubleshoot their devices.
After the end of the beta period, Apple
also faced several problems with iOS 7 (such as an iMessage bug and several
security issues) when it rolled out the release to the public. Again, the
problems with iOS 7 were compounded by the popularity of the operating system
as well as Apple’s unique strategy of making it available to every compatible
device on the first day of availability. That's a credit to Apple, but also now
a source of headaches.
That experience demonstrated that iOS isn't
just a faceless operating system operating a popular device, but part of
mainstream tech culture—new features, bugs and all.
Android Is All Grown Up
Google used to update Android several times
a year to add features while fixing bugs and security holes. Google has since
slowed its release cycle; the period between the June 2012 launch of Jelly Bean
4.1 and KitKat 4.4 October 2013 was the longest that Google had gone without
releasing a new, named version of Android (Google launched two Jelly Bean updates—4.2
and 4.3—in the interim).
Google’s Android engineers believe they
have achieved feature parity with other major mobile platforms (such as iOS and
Windows Phone). The Jelly Bean 4.3 release saw the integration of several minor
user features and a couple background developer features, like Bluetooth Smart
integration. Android updates are getting smaller and further between.
As such, Google has turned its attention to
other aspects of Android. In May of this year, Google didn’t announce a new
version of Android but rather a suite of new tools for developers to make more
money from their Android apps such as the ability to accept a variety of
currencies and a translation service. Google also released its own integrated
developer environment—Android Studio—at Google I/O. In October, Google released
KitKat 4.4, making Android much slimmer to run on a variety of hardware
profiles.
Windows Phone Claims Clear No. 3 Status
Nokia Lumia 1520Nokia Lumia 1520
At the beginning of 2013, the company
formerly known as Research In Motion changed its name to BlackBerry. It then
released BlackBerry 10, the long-awaited update to its aging mobile operating
system. At the time, it was a very fair question to ask if BlackBerry or
Windows Phone would emerge as the clear third operating system after Android
and iOS.
Anybody that picked BlackBerry was kidding
themselves (me included). BlackBerry 10 fell flat and by the autumn the company
was looking to sell itself to anybody that could foot the bill.
In the meantime, Windows Phone continued to
rise (albeit with marginal growth compared to iOS and Android). Nokia’s push
towards a wider portfolio of devices along with its ability to feature new
developer tools like the Image SDK have allowed Windows Phone to claim the No.
3 tag ahead of competitors like Firefox OS, BlackBerry or any other emerging
platforms.
Microsoft is committed to Windows Phone and
its $7.4 billion acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services division is an
example of that. For the foreseeable future, Windows Phone will be able to hold
its position in the market and carve out a user base.
The Beginning Of Enterprise Mobile 2.0
From Appcelerator developer surveyFrom
Appcelerator developer survey
If we date the smartphone revolution to
July 2007 (when the iPhone was released), then we are now in Year 6 of mobile
changing consumer behavior. Yet for large companies, the full effect of mobile
is only beginning to be felt.
For enterprises, mobility was once
synonymous with BlackBerry devices and laptops. The primary concerns at the
time were to make those devices as secure as possible while also enabling
workers to go just about anywhere. The same cycle is being played out, just
this time with Androids and iPhones and tablets. That was essentially what
Enterprise Mobile 1.0 was about: security and the bring-your-own-device
movement.
Enterprises move much slower than the rest
of the consumer world. They have old processes, old ways of making decisions
and spending money. Instead of six week or even six month windows, enterprises
work on 18 to 36 month cycles. That includes technology adoption. Last year I
joked with an IBM mobile executive that enterprise mobile was in version 1.5,
somewhere between adoption and optimization.
Enterprise Mobile 2.0 is about adoption,
efficiency, optimization and productivity. After securing the devices and apps
they use, many companies focused on one important aspect of mobility that
suited their enterprise needs. Accounting, sales, marketing, CRM, compliance,
employee management, IT or any variety of other departments went mobile. In
2013, we are seeing enterprises that have adopted mobile practices begin to
branch out. Now, instead of just having one mobile solution (like a CRM app),
enterprises are creating mobile capability for more departments as they upgrade
their infrastructures.
It is not just large technology enterprises
that are pushing mobile either. Large enterprises in a variety of sectors are
going mobile, some of which have been slow to the party. Industries like
healthcare, banking, transportation, government, automotive, telecommunications
and insurance are becoming increasingly mobile. These industries are updating
their horizontal capabilities with customer-centric apps as well as improving
their cloud infrastructure and developer processes to align themselves for the
next 10 years of mobile innovation.
The Streaming App & Connected
Televisions
Early in 2013, HTC and Samsung both came
out with capabilities in their flagship smartphones (the HTC One and Samsung
Galaxy S4) that included infrared blasters. Those IR blasters could serve as
remote controls to televisions or any other old remote device. It was the
beginning of a trend that would come to some extremes in 2013.
Later in the year, Google announced the
Chromecast, a dongle that plugs into a TV that allows for users to stream
YouTube, Netflix or movies and music from the Google Play store. Chromecast
owners can use their Android or iPhone to control the dongle as a remote
control. Later in the year, popular streaming box Roku also released an app
that allows users to control it with a smartphone.
Both Roku and Chromecast join a variety of
features from across the industry, such as Apple TV, where users can stream what
is playing on their phones/tablets to a television set or use their smartphones
as remotes to control their televisions.
The Year Of The Smartphone Camera
The Lumia 1020 camera is second to none.The
Lumia 1020 camera is second to none.
Mobile manufacturers have had to face a
difficult truth over the last couple of years: it is really difficult to market
their new flagship smartphones without some type of hook or gimmick. The
problem for manufacturers is that they are running out of natural extensions of
mobile computing to add those eye-catching gimmicks.
Voice control was popularized in
smartphones by Apple’s Siri. Gesture-based (both facial movement and
touch-based) computing is interesting and still evolving, but not the selling
point that it used to be. People do not care as much about speeds and feeds
(the hardware inside the device) as much as they once did.
With avenues to gain consumer attention
dwindling, manufacturers have taken to enhancing and marketing one of the
most-used aspects of smartphones: the camera.
Every major smartphone announcement this
year has featured significant new camera features. It started with BlackBerry’s
editing tools that could allow you to erase movement in a picture in the
BlackBerry Z10 and moved to the new sharing features and “ultrapixels” in the
HTC One. Samsung’s 13-megapixel Galaxy S4 camera has so many features and modes
that the smartphone’s camera took up about half of our review of the device.
The Moto X has a gesture-based “quick open”
feature with enhanced optics and a 10MP camera. The iPhone also greatly
upgraded its optics with a bigger aperture that captures more light and new
photo modes. All in all, smartphone cameras were greatly improved this year and
have become the primary battle point in the advertising and marketing wars
between manufacturers.
Of all of these smartphone camera
innovations, Nokia took the cake. The Finnish manufacturer released the Lumia
1020 with a 41 MP camera, enhanced optics and software to control them. A
camera like the one on the Lumia 1020 has never really been featured on a
top-end smartphone before (though the smartphone itself is just decent). If
2013 was the year of the smartphone camera, Nokia can claim the title of best
mobile camera of the year.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기