Smartphones to rule by 2014, predicts Gartner

By the year 2014 the mobile environment will be dominated by smartphones. This is one of the many bold predictions by technology analyst Nick Jones, speaking on Tuesday at the Gartner Symposium on Innovation in the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

Jones also predicts that smartphone penetration in South Africa is likely to reach 80% by 2014. Jones is a vice-president at Gartner and his work focuses primarily on mobile business and technology, mobile applications and emerging technologies.

He foresees a royal battle for the top mobile operating system between the iPhone and Android platforms but a “bleak future” for Symbian and RIM (Blackberry) while saving most of his scorn for Microsoft. While there is “nothing wrong” with Windows 7 phones, Jones seems to think it’s a case of “too little, too late”. Microsoft is “too far behind”, particularly in the development of app stores, and is unlikely to break into the top four mobile operating systems.

He predicts that the Symbian operating system will remain dominant in Europe for the next few years, but will lose market share consistently because it’s “just not cool”. He argues that Symbian’s user-experience has been surpassed by the iPhone’s iOS and Android mobile operating systems because they’re not innovating and adapting fast enough. Instead the company is just “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.

Jones reckons that tablet computers, like the iPad, will remain niche until they define a space that is not somewhere in between a mobile phone and a laptop.

Jones urged the South African tech community to push for Long Term Evolution (LTE), a new mobile communication standard that promises to push wi-fi up to warp speed, presently being rolled out in Western economies.

Touch screens, pico projectors and augmented reality
Some other key technologies to be aware of? Touch screens will continue their explosive growth until they “dominate completely”. Jones says e-book readers will grow slowly and steadily, while pico projectors (or pocket projectors/mobile projectors) and mobile augmented reality tools are starting to become “very interesting”.

Voice still the ‘killer app’
Jones says that voice is still the “killer app” for mobile. Companies like Skype, Yahoo!, Fring and Nimbuzz are doing amazing things in this arena, and the aggregation of IM is something to watch closely. Voice-controlled search functions and voice-controlled wiki editing will continue to grow. With voice-controlled search, users are increasingly able to make statements like “find me tickets to the 8 o’clock show of this movie”, and their smartphones understand what is required of them to fulfill that request.

‘Democratisation of personal messaging’
After voice, the “democratisation of personal messaging” was spoken about at length by Jones. Social networking, micro-blogging and e-mail are vital to the future of mobile, with location-based services likely to add an interesting layer in the years to come. E-mail on the go is already a mature, tried-and-tested application, with more than 500-million subscribers worldwide having used mobile e-mail. That number will grow to 800-million in the next few years, with the most growth coming from “active sync with the exchange server over the public internet”.

Mobile video coming of age
Jones says mobile video has not achieved much traction up until now, but that is likely to change as the technology finally comes of age. HD-quality is already standard on some Samsung handsets, and OLED screens which are “daylight visible”. Much of the reason mobile video hasn’t really taken off in some parts of the world, reckons Jones, may be for vanity reasons. This is because the phone can be unflattering in how it makes a person look, but the integration of apps like Skype mean video-conferencing and video in general is likely to explode in the near future.

Phones go social
“Integration” was a key finding that emerged out of Jones’ presentation. There is no other platform as capable as the smartphone of delivering all the applications consumers want at once. In the future, we won’t have separate social clients for all our different operations, we’ll just have one single, integrated, platform-agnostic client that does it all.

Phone manufacturers are already recognising this fact, which is reflected in the tight integration of social applications into the user interface of the phone, particularly in the Android operating system or the Windows 7 People Hub.

Control gives way to flexibility in the workplace
Jones’ address was wrapped up with a discussion of the changing nature of the workplace. “Control” is giving way to “flexibility”, office-based arrangements are yielding to “work from anywhere” setups, structure is being replaced by “ad-hocracy“.

The changes in our work habits are being mirrored by the shifts in mobile technology and show how the way we work changes in tandem with the tools that we use.