Look up in the sky! It’s a bird It’s a plane. It’s SmartPhone!

Look up in the sky!  It’s a bird  It’s  a plane. It’s SmartPhone!  Faster than a speeding Internet, more powerful than a PC, able to leap the adoption of Television in a single bound. Yes, SmartPhone, spreading faster than any technology in Human History.

Ok, a little melodramatic, buy accurate nonetheless.  Wasabi Roll found In a recent analysis, nine technologies since 1876, the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, were reviewed in three phases of technology adoption, traction, maturity, and saturation. 

Those subject to endpoint infrastructure issues, like last mile connections, were expected to be adopted more slowly, e.g., electricity, telephones, etc.  For example, it took several decades before landline phones (note the need for the distinction now…) to reach saturation where demand begins to slow. Conversely, mobile phones only took 20 years.  Now Smartphones are on track to halve that rate again. 

A Little History

Now admittedly, the adoption rates are extruded from the available data and since not every technology is easily tracked, the sampling and the reader’s own experiences probably will affirm the axiom. From the figures, you can see that the SmartPhone has outpaced comparable technology.  It took landline telephones 45 years to get to 50% penetration, and mobile phones took around 7 years.  Conversely, SmartPhones achieved this in as little as 4 years (even during a recession).  Comparatively speaking the only technology that moved as quickly is the television (between 1950 and 1953).

Now BellSouth did launch the IBM Simon back in the day, with its rudimentary touch screen circa 1993, but the era of the smart phone really didn’t kick off until 2002 when and existing PDA was enhanced with a cell radio to make phone calls.  That year RIM shipped its first Blackberry with phone features. Remember the Palm-OS and the Treo line?  Even Microsoft jumped in with its Pocket PC Phone Edition.

Skipping the whole Newton thing, four and half years later comes the iconic iPhone selling a mere 715,000, yet was 6% of the market at the time, so not bad.  In fact, it was tracking with PCs adoption the previous decade and even more slowly than the radio decades before.

However, all that changed when iPhone sales skyrocketed to 1.12 million units in the first quarter even at a $399.00 price.  Thereafter, the market share doubled to 11% of the US mobile phone sales.  Nielsen now reports that nearly 2/3 of US mobile phone sales are SmartPhones.  In fact, in the US, 50% of mobile users are using a SmartPhone, roughly 40% of the population.

Why SmartPhones, why Now?

SmartPhones seem to tap a nerve in the public.  With all the features aside, camera, mp3 player, navigation, maps, et. al.  It seems to satisfy a need to communicate, while eliminating the esoteric, namely texting.

But people use texts for a variety of other purposes. What’s fascinating is what people are willing to say in texts that they would never say in person. Somehow it’s OK to be a little more revealing, forthright, and feisty than it is when you’re talking face to face. And this honesty-via-text works both to our detriment and betterment. So why is it that texting has gone viral?

The short answer is because it puts some extra space between us and our recipients. It removes us from reality just enough so that we get up the chutzpa to say these things we’d normally be too anxious to reveal or ask of another. For this very reason, some psychiatrists, like Dr. Alan Manevitz, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, have integrated texting in their practices, encouraging patients to text message what’s happening in their lives in real time. While this sounds like it would be enough to drive a psychiatrist mad, it actually serves a great purpose.

Tab Your It!

Arriving in the wake of smart phones, tablets appear poised for even swifter adoption. After years of false starts, the tablet market sprang to life with the launch of Apple’s iPad in April 2010. Only 18 months later, tablet penetration among U.S. households had already hit 11 percent, according to a Google/Ipsos study. No other technology in this comparison has had such a fast start. Since that date, Amazon’s (essentially U.S.-only) Kindle Fire was introduced and sold at least five million units. In the last two quarters, Apple has also sold approximately 10 million more iPads in the U.S. market. As a result, the number of consumers in the U.S. who own a tablet computer now exceeds 13 percent just two years into the market’s existence.

According to Gartner, there are now at least 1.4 billion PCs in use worldwide. It remains to be seen whether tablets can maintain their record-setting pace. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are already selling more than 1.4 billion units every single year. One thing seems certain: squeezed between tablets and ever-smarter phones, the PC is seeing its reign as the world’s “personal” computer draw to a close.

Source(s):

• http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427787/are-smart-phones-spreading-faster-than-any-technology-in-human-history/page/2/
• http://www.articlesbase.com/cell-phones-articles/why-are-mobile-phones-so-popular-367791.html
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/11/23/psychology-texting-smarphone-why-your-smart-phone-says-more-about-you-than-you-do/2/

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

____________________________________________________________

About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 21 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 399-6085