Cell or smart phones will be the next consumer product to be obsolete.
Apple never produced any phones, but always computers. The iPhone? Is an illusion. It’s a computer with an added 5% of the real estate for the phone on the CPU board. The real smart thing was to call it a phone 🙂
Is it just semantics?
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Not at all – There is a critical difference: It’s all about the underlying technology. Companies building “Consumer Computer” as I call it, need to have control over high performance, low power – low footprint CPUs. Apple purchased that technology for a reason 😉
There are only a few people who have the capacity to do that: Dell, Oracle (SUN’s CPU production), Siemens, Samsung…. and of course Apple. Whoever wants to seriously compete with the “phone business” in general and Apple in particular needs to “think different” when it comes to “smart phones”. In contrast, smart phone manufacturer like RIM or Nokia have no capabilities to build any of those “Consumer Computers” any soon. Intel may not be the one which understands, designs and market the necessary CPUs, Microsoft’s 30 year old OS design is light years away from doing anything near that.
Nokia, RIM and a few others are the last smart phone manufacturer. They may cease cell phone production in the next 5 or so years. There is simply no more room for smart phones in the future – only very smart and ever smaller computer which do all kinds of things and the phone capability is just a “side effect”. My iPhone is a computer, timer, calendar, GPS, Wind meter, AIS (sailing), remote control, cloud monitoring device, speedometer, altitude meter, compass, photo camera, video camera… oh almost forgot and a phone.
As such the race for “Consumer Computer” is just beginning and all bets are on right now.
Consumer Computer will be the first Trillion $ technology segment.
Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS
(my entire social presence)
I’d like to see phones completely move apart from a device like a smartphone and to a headset only type device. All other things we need with a phone like caller ID, contacts etc. would be part of an app accessible when the phone is close to a computer device. Proximity would activate the app when the phone is close. The app would be housed in the cloud.