2010: A smartphone odyssey

Is the smartphone the new computer? That’s a point that has been argued back and forth extensively but it misses the point, which is that the smartphone isn’t really a traditional computer at all. While the average PC/laptop is best suited for Web browsing, running productivity applications and playing the occasional game, a smartphone is more of a multimedia juggernaut. While there are business-oriented smartphones that hook into corporate e-mail and let you view or even edit documents, technological developments on this front are geared towards improving the portable multimedia experience. Today 8 megapixel cameras are available on the LG Renoir, Samsung Innov8 and Sony Ericsson C905 among others. Xenon flashes on these phones help capture photos of moving objects or those in low light conditions. The only downside is that, unlike LED, you cannot use a Xenon flash for capturing video. Cameraphones that support 3x optical zoom are available and 8x is the next step. All of which means that cameraphones are poised to replace point and shoot cameras in the near future.

Less obvious, but perhaps more important, Symmetric Multiprocessing or SMP, a feature earlier found only on servers and more recently on PCs will soon find its way to smartphones. Many smartphones released in the last couple of years already have dual CPUs. In fact, one of the features that Symbian is working on is support for SMP. Phones with multi-core processors are expected by 2010 and the goal is to offer applications that are optimized to run on these phones. Interestingly, one of the plus points of SMP on a smartphone is going to be lower battery consumption. Having multiple processing units that run at a lower clock speed means that less power is consumed. This is one of the primary reasons why computer makers stopped gunning for faster CPUs and switched to multi-core chips and the same logic applies to smartphones as well. Moreover, as these devices become widely used, the threat scenario will worsen and you will need an anti-virus application just as you do on your PC and having one or more multi-core CPUs on your phone will let you stay safe without slowing down your device to the point of it being useless.

An obvious trend is that of larger screens with better resolutions. For a while now QVGA 320x240 has been common but we will see better resolutions on larger screens becoming the norm in the next couple of years. Already top-of-the-line phones have better displays with near VGA resolutions emerging this year. That may not sound like a lot from the desktop perspective but keep in mind that a phone’s screen is much smaller and these resolutions on those smaller screens makes for sharp and clear rendering of text and images. OLED is making its way onto the phone scene and these displays offer crisper and brighter visuals than LCDs. OLED also consumes less power and is flexible allowing for innovative designs.

Another noticeable aspect of smartphones is storage. 16 to 24 GB is already possible and available on some high-end models. 8 GB is becoming the standard on mid-range smartphones. This ties in neatly with the multimedia-centric nature of most of these devices. If you want to use a smartphone as your camera or even camcorder (smartphones that record 30 fps VGA exist) you need lots of storage space. Similarly if you would prefer to listen to music on your phone rather than carry a separate MP3 player, having spare gigabytes of storage helps. Storage is doubling every year, and two years from now 64 GB of storage will be available on high-end phones while 16 to 32 GB will be routine.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com