When: 1992
Where: USA
Why: The smartphone has changed perceptions of mobile communication and provided business users with an office on the go
How: IBM unveiled a vision of a mobile phone-PDA hybrid, but Apple made it into a commercial phenomenon
Who: Various companies, primarily IBM, Apple and BlackBerry
Fact: Experts predict that 300 million smartphones will be sold worldwide in 2013
Many of the ideas detailed in these pages can trace their origins back decades, to innovations created in the Victorian era, if not earlier. Not so for the smartphone; in fact it’s less than 20 years since this device’s earliest ancestor was introduced to the public. The iPhone, surely the most famous member of the smartphone family, has only been around for four years, and most of its cousins are even younger.
However, during its short life the smartphone has already transformed the way people work, the way they shop, the way they communicate and the way they spend their downtime. It’s disrupted traditional IT and communications industries, while creating satellite markets all of its own. And, by sweeping away the established the existing technological order, it’s paved the way for countless equally innovative devices in the future.
Essentially, the smartphone is the product of two very different technologies: the mobile phone and the personal digital assistant (or PDA). Both of these are, themselves, relatively recent. Although work on mobile telephones began as long ago as the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that development really began to speed up; companies such as Motorola, with the DynaTAC, and Nokia, with the Cityman, produced handsets that fitted perfectly into contemporary corporate culture and created a burgeoning market for mobile handsets.
Meanwhile, the PDA had evolved, thanks to a chain of inventions in the 1970s. In 1974 George Margolin invented a modular device that looked like a calculator but could be reworked into a keyboard. Four years later, a small company called Lexicon created a handheld electronic language translator with functions including interchangeable modules, databases and notepads. In the same year two young inventors, Judah Klausner and Bob Hotto, conceived a device which looked and felt like a calculator but could also be used to store essential details such as names, telephone numbers and basic memos.
By the early 1990s both PDAs and mobiles were becoming big business. For the PDA market, Hewlett-Packard launched the Jaguar in 1991, and Apple began work on the popular Newton, a device that translated handwritten notes into memos and gave users the choice of several simple games. Meanwhile the mobile phone was demonstrating ever greater potential; Group System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technology came on stream in 1990, heralding the dawn of second-generation (2G) phones, and the first text message was sent in 1992.
Against this background, Frank Canova, an IBM engineer, came up with the idea of adding organiser functions to a cellular phone, and created a team of 40 full-time staff to work on the project. The product, called Simon, was eventually designed to combine the functions of mobile phone, pager, PDA and fax machine in one device based on a microprocessor that held two forms of memory: ROM for the core computing functions, and PSRAM, a form of random-access memory, for the user’s essential information.
Simon was way ahead of its time in several respects. The core functions included a series of rudimentary ‘apps’ such as a calendar, calculator, address book and global clock; the entry system was speeded up with predictive text capability; and the relatively old-fashioned keyboard was replaced with touchscreen technology, made possible by a 1½ inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. When the product made its debut as a prototype at 1992 industry convention COMDEX, it made an instant impression – one attendee was reported as saying it was the first time a company had placed a computer in a cellular phone, rather than placing a cellular phone in a computer.
Frank Canova, an IBM engineer, came up with the idea of adding organiser functions to a cellular phone, and created a team of 40 full-time staff to work on the project.
But as soon as the product was officially launched, in spring 1994, problems began. The shipping date, originally scheduled for April, was delayed as a result of bugs in Simon’s cellular faxing capability. When it finally reached the shelves, consumers were underwhelmed; Simon was slightly too heavy to fit in the average jacket pocket, it broke easily, the screen was too small and the battery ran out after just an hour of constant use.
After months of low sales, Simon was withdrawn from the market – it is estimated that only 2,000 units were ever made. But, by proving that a mobile phone could be combined with a personal organiser, it provided a crucial stepping-stone towards the later emergence of smartphones. Over the next few years a wave of similar products reached the market, facilitated by the creation of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard for mobile phones in the late 1990s.
Prior to the introduction of WAP, a number of mobile companies had begun to explore ways to create handsets with wireless internet connectivity. As a result, myriad technologies had sprouted, with little common ground between them. In response, four of the leading market players – Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Phone.com – came together to create the WAP forum in 1997, in order to formulate a common standard for wireless connectivity.
The proceedings of the WAP forum led to the establishment of a clear set of internet protocols that could be supported by an array of mobile phone networks, and gave mobile developers clear specifications to follow. The forum’s members also agreed on the creation of a new type of server, called a WAP gateway, which would take a web page and translate it into wireless content using mobile-friendly programming language. With this innovation, the WAP pioneers had created a bridge between mobile devices and the burgeoning internet, and allowed the smartphone to become a commercial reality.
Even before the WAP mobile standards were introduced in 1999, mobile manufacturers had begun to test the market with phones that offered basic internet connectivity. The year 1996 had seen the launch of the Nokia 9000 Communicator, which included an integrated keyboard capable of providing internet access. A year later, Ericsson had launched a concept phone known as Penelope, which enabled the user to send and receive emails; this was the first device to be openly branded as a ‘smartphone’. However, following the release of WAP, the trickle of web-enabled mobile products became a flood.
In 2000 Ericsson, eager to capitalise on the widespread interest sparked by Penelope, launched the R380, an ultra-light and compact device that included a built-in modem and utilised a new mobile operating system known as Symbian, which was specifically designed for the smartphone. Two years later Palm, which had already built up a substantial following within the business community thanks to the Palm Pilot organiser, unveiled the Treo, which offered all the functionality of Palm’s existing PDAs, with the added bonus of email access. Meanwhile Research In Motion (RIM), a young company headquartered in Canada, began experiencing considerable success with its family of BlackBerry smartphones.
RIM’s first offering, the 850, released in 1999, looked and felt like a pager, and its scope was limited by today’s standards – it even ran on AA batteries. But gradually RIM began to add new functions to the BlackBerry, such as international roaming and push emailing, which automatically forwarded a user’s emails from their office server to their individual mobile device. The company also doubled the size of the screen and memory, and then it launched SureType, a keyboard standard that assigned two letters to each key, allowing the manufacturers to reduce the size so drastically that their device could fit in a user’s pocket. In 2005 RIM’s BlackBerry sales shot up by 46% to 3.2 million units – sales would not fall again until the first quarter of 2011.
Then, in 2007, the flurry of development around the smartphone reached a crescendo with the launch of the iPhone, perhaps the most recognisable smartphone on the market today. The iPhone was born out of Apple founder Steve Jobs’s vision for a device that harnessed the potential of the touch screen and an array of additional features such as music and internet connectivity, while providing the on-the-go convenience of a mobile phone. In 2005 Jobs commissioned a top-secret development project, carried out in collaboration with AT&T Mobility, with no expense spared. From robot testing rooms set up to test the iPhone’s antennas, to scale models of human heads used to measure radiation, Apple pulled out all the stops to make its smartphone a success.
For the iPhone, Apple managed to rewrite its desktop operating system, OS X, for a mobile device little bigger than a man’s hand, and the developers were able to harness the power of the Safari web browser. This meant that, rather than having to compress web pages into a smaller format, the iPhone was able to display each page in its full, original form. Using technology that had already been mapped out for tablet PCs, Apple transformed the touch screen experience, creating an icon-driven interface that allowed users to manipulate everything from music tracks and photo albums and Word documents, using only their fingers. And the whole process was super-fast, thanks to the advanced capability of the new ARM 11 chip.
The release of the iPhone was swiftly followed by the Android, a device based on cross-industry collaboration and knowledge sharing. The Android was the first in a series of products developed by the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of technology companies set up to create open standards for mobile devices; furthermore, the software was released on open source, so manufacturers of all shapes and sizes could develop their own Androids.
This open, cooperative arrangement has resulted in numerous Android variants flooding the market, taking the smartphone to even greater peaks of sales and popularity. Indeed recent reports predict that global smartphone sales will reach 420 million units this year, and more than a billion by 2016. According to a report released by research specialist Olswang in March 2011, the rate of smartphone adoption has increased sharply in recent months; over 20% of UK consumers now have a smartphone, and this percentage rises to 31% amongst 24- to 35-year-olds.
The smartphone has already brought seismic change to the technology and communications industries. According to Gartner, PC shipments experienced their first year-on-year decline for six quarters during the first three months of 2011 – and a significant factor in this fall has been the emergence of the smartphone, which offers all the core functions of a desktop computer with far greater freedom and flexibility. Meanwhile, many commentators believe the iPhone has prepared the ground for countless equally innovative mobile solutions in the future. In the past, the mobile carriers were the pivot of the industry, and manufacturers were under pressure to create products as cheap and cheerful as possible to appease them. But now, as Wired magazine put it in 2008, ‘every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of’.
The smartphone has already brought seismic change to the technology and communications industries.
Furthermore, the current generation of smartphones has given birth to a whole new industry based around applications, or apps. The idea of an online marketplace for phone applications actually came from Marc Benioff, a former Apple intern who rose to become CEO of Salesforce.com. Benioff suggested the idea to Steve Jobs, who turned the idea into a commercial proposition that ran as follows: Apple would take downloadable applications built by third-party developers and publish them on a central marketplace known as the Appstore. If an app was downloaded, Apple would split the profits with the developer. As soon as it went live in summer 2008, the Appstore became a huge success; user downloads generated $21m in revenue for app developers in its first three days.
Since then BlackBerry, Nokia and the Android developers have launched their own appstores, and the app has become a global phenomenon. More than 10 billion apps have now been downloaded, covering everything from news and games to journey planners and price comparison. According to one research company, worldwide revenue from consumer apps will reach $38bn by 2015, and a whole new type of development company is springing up, from boutique specialists charging £50,000 for producing a single app, to DIY app-build kits that charge less than £100 per design.
By altering the fundamental rhythms of people’s behaviour, the smartphone has also left its imprint on countless other sectors, nowhere more so than in the retail industry. In 2010 the value of global mobile transactions reached $162bn. Many believe that this inexorable growth will see the closure of dozens of bricks-and-mortar outlets, which lack the convenience of mobile shopping. Belatedly, however, retail firms are starting to wake up to the potential of mobile-commerce. In April 2011, a UK study found that 74% of retailers were in the process of developing a mobile strategy, predicated on the iPhone.
The business landscape has also been transformed. According to a survey of business executives released last year, 34% of people now use their smartphone more than their computer for work-related tasks, and the greater mobility and flexibility of the smartphone are expected to trigger a surge in mobile working as busy executives choose to work from home with all the functionality of an office desktop computer. As more and more employees begin working remotely, the issue of smartphone protection will become increasingly important, creating a huge new revenue stream for IT security companies; in fact, Global Industry Analysts predicts that the smartphone security software industry will reach a global value of $2.99bn by 2017.
The smartphone is such a young technology, it’s difficult to predict where it will go next. At present, it seems likely that we will see increasing convergence between smartphones and tablets – the huge screens of the latest HTC and Samsung phones would certainly suggest a blurring of the lines. The market may even settle on a form of smartphone–tablet hybrid carrying all the core functions of a desk-based PC – creating the first-ever truly mobile office.
At the moment, however, the smartphone industry is embroiled in a full-blown form war, centred on operating systems: Apple’s iOS is competing with Android, Symbian, and Nokia’s in-house system for control of the market. Although Google and Apple’s systems currently enjoy the lion’s share of sales, and app selection, the conflict has yet to reach a decisive point. The future of the smartphone, in particular the technology it uses, could hinge on the outcome.