Having to decide on which smart phone to get once my contract is up w/ Sprint got me thinking, What have smart phones replace so far? It was only a few years ago that people carry both an MP3 player and a phone. Now, people only carry the iPhone. What else will the Smartphone replace? I will put a percentage as my best guess on how much of the smartphone populous actually use this function, as well as my guess as to how long will it take before the tech will be advanced enough for 100% usage
MP3 player - 100% - If you got the iPhone and don't use it as an MP3 player, you must be on crack.
Video player - 70% - 2-7 years - Screen is still too small. The iPhone tops out at 3.5", which is decent, but I wouldn't want to watch a whole movie on that screen. Battery life is still a problem. Watching a whole movie would sapped a majority of the battery life on the phone. I'm guess in 2 years, the battery issue should be improved enough or if not, by 5 years, fuel cell batteries should be ready. As for the screen, projector built into smartphones and flexible screens both should improve the screen size, but it can take up to 7 years for flexible screens to be truly ready for the public.
Email - 100% - Its called the Blackberry.
eBook reader - 40% - 7 years - It needs the flexible screen. People use iPhone to read webpages, but not eBooks. The screen is just too small.
Camera - 85% - >2 years - While everyone uses it for quick snaps, Most smart phones lack a lot of functions that point and shoots have, like flash, optical zoom, lighting adjustments, and image stabilizations. The Samsung Omnia comes pretty close with most of these features, but when frontrunner iPhones continues to neglect this area, it will take some time before this feature will replace the point and shoot camera completely. Also, a point and shoot doesn't have features like Geotagging (w/o some sort of an add-on).
GPS - 50% - 1-3 years - While the GPS has gotten way more accurate with built in GPS and cellphone tower triangulation, this feature is not used often for a few reasons. The carriers like to charge a lot for this, and they don't want to be sued if you are talking on the phone and get distracted and ended up driving into a ditch (or a river) that the GPS told you to drive into. Including GPS also allows for accurate traffic report when there's enough people carrying phones with this feature.
That's it for now. More to follow...
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