What Will Be the Next Big Thing in the Mobile Space?
The speculation and anticipation over the iPad is now over, at least in the U.S., and we fickle mobile enthusiasts now turn our thoughts to what will come next. The past two years have been exciting in the mobile space, with smartphones gaining full computing power and netbooks taking the world by storm. Apple has shaken things up with the iPad, and slates are on the minds of many enthusiasts. Will the Next Big Thing (NBT) in the mobile space come from the phone sector, or the notebook segment or will it be a tablet of some sort? That’s not clear at this point, but I believe that the driver will not be technology, it will be usage driven.
What I mean by usage driven is the NBT is going to come from creating a new way to do things that people want to do. That may come from online activities, or handling daily tasks or a combination of those. There are already mobile devices that can do everything that people want, whether in a laptop form or with a phone. The trick is going to lie in showing a new way to do these things that blows everything else out of the water. That’s not going to be easy for companies to produce.
Smartphones of today are full computers that can do many of the things formerly relegated to bigger devices. The processors are fast and platforms have evolved to take advantage of that in the phone space. While phones are often able to do the things people want, the restrictions of the screen size and input mechanisms are not going away. While I agree with Stacey at GigaOM that multiple core processors in phones will make them incredibly powerful, the input/output limitations will prevent them from being able to use that power to its fullest potential. We will see the smartphone continue to evolve, but the NBT will not be a phone due to these limitations.
Notebooks are evolving at a slower pace than phones, and we’re not seeing new usage scenarios for them. They will continue to dominate the computing space, but improvements will be incremental at best. Netbooks are still selling in good numbers, but we’ve seen just about everything that can be packed into the small budget-friendly form already done. The notebook/netbook will continue to be the primary computers for most folks, but hardly the NBT.
Slates have gotten new life in the minds of many, but they are not new technology. The iPad has pushed slates to the forefront of the mobile space, and while the form makes it possible to do many things in a more appropriate way, it doesn’t bring anything new to the user. It doesn’t create new uses for consumers like the NBT should do. The iPad is fun and useful, but at its core it is only providing uses that are already provided by other devices. Apple will sell a boatload of iPads, but it’s not the NBT.
The same is going to hold true for the many slates we are bound to see coming down the pike. They will do many things, and some of them very well, but nothing really new. They will attempt to duplicate the popularity of the iPad, and some may come close, but there won’t be anything truly innovative in this process. The slate will simply be another way to do the things that folks already do.
It may sound like I am cynical, and perhaps that is true. But I also find it a great time to be a mobile enthusiast, as the advancements in the past few years have been extraordinary. I am itching to see something new come along that will blow me away in sheer usefulness. That’s the primary requirement for the NBT for me — give me a new use that will rock my world.
The Microsoft Courier concept that has leaked out in videos is the primary candidate for the NBT. This device doesn’t fit into current categories, it is creating something totally new. It is an attempt to bring the day planner of old into the digital age, and that can be huge. It was only a few years ago when seemingly everyone carried one of those paper day planners. I attended countless meetings where the conference table was covered with planners. I used one myself, it was a way to organize my life, keep track of the things important to me and to make sure I didn’t overlook anything significant.
Smartphones began to take over some of the roles of the day planner, and they started to disappear. But the smartphone, due to the screen limitations mentioned, can’t really replace all of the benefits the day planner provided. This is where the Courier has amazing potential. The videos of the Courier show a day planner that totally integrates the web, the professional life and the social life of the user. It is the glue that binds all of that together, and has the potential to leverage that in a way that can vary as needed for the individual. It is a way to make mobile tech highly personal, and this can be big.
Where the digital planner (Courier) can make the biggest contribution for the user is through search. The day planner of old suffered from the inability to easily find things as needed, especially those things not in the immediate past. The Courier will not suffer from that disadvantage; it will enable the user to find anything, or more appropriately everything as needed. It will turn the web into a vast fountain of information that when coupled with each user’s personal information, will be the most important tool to come along in a great while.
So my requirement that the NBT present a new use for the individual is met by the Courier as demonstrated. Keeping all of the stuff that is important to the individual at hand, in an easily accessible way. It is personal by nature, and that can change the way we work. This could be the Next Big Thing.
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It seems curious that you think courier will be so different. I Your point on the day planner being a potential game changer is interesting but I don’t think the courier (even though their example is impressive) will have done it in a way that fundamentally moves the goal posts. I think between what is being done by companies such as Google and tablets such as the iPad the functionality can and will be out there before courier ever comes to the market. Now, there is a potential that even if that is the case, the courier may package things so nicely that it blows everyone away (eg. how flip turned the video camera industry) but I personally think the day planner market to be too small to have such a seismic effect.
I agree with @wk24 that you haven’t given a good enough argument for why the Courier is a potential NBT while other this/light slates (iPad, Android, etc) are not. If the difference is the fact that the Courier has two screens then I think you need to explain why that has such as large impact. If the difference is in the software then I think we haven’t seen enough software specifically designed for slates running a slate-specific OS to make a judgment about it.
My argument is that the form factor is not the main thing that will change things. It’s the interaction of the user with the device (interface, software), the interaction of the user’s information (PIM, etc.) with online resources (not just social networks), and how fluidly this all works together.
From the Courier videos I can see all of those things in one package. If it comes to market of course.
That may be true, but from the Courier concept videos, it would seem that all of this interaction is tuned for a fairly narrow range of visual-design-specific use cases. As a librarian, a musician, and a sometimes-writer, I haven’t yet seen anything that suggests that the Courier would have a place in my professional or personal workflows. In contrast, the iPad fits neatly into my life right now. (I have to admit, though, that I am very fond of the book-inspired Courier form factor.)
What’s most interesting about the Courier, IMHO, is not “new” — it’s an extension of the pen-centric, inky to the core, Newton, into a wireless / cloud computing communication system. If it delivers that, I’m not sure it’ll be a fabulous hit, but it will be an incredible useful device.
A day planner? NBT? I don’t think so.
I think the reason so many people have a difficult time trying to determine the next big thing in mobile is because they are looking at it from the view of ‘creation’.
That will come.
Right now, we are in a period of destruction. The smartphone and mobile slates will destroy PCs, books, cable television, several oppressive governments, big box retailers and a host of other businesses and industries.
I think instead we should look at what the smartphone will destroy, then try to determine what will be created — and become the NBT.
Smartphones? Destroy PCs? I highly doubt that.
Why? Gaming, HD video editing, and just about anything that requires far more processing power and/or storage than a mobile device from the same time period. A custom-built desktop gets so much more bang for the buck in comparison.
Now, what may happen is that today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s PC, and today’s PC is tomorrow’s home server/mainframe/etc. Many may get by just fine with the former if it could be docked into a station that resembles today’s PCs, but the enthusiasts like myself may invest in one of those home servers for having ludicrous amounts of storage, being able to play demanding games and run other sorts of demanding apps, or maybe even just gain more control over our personal clouds, rather than relying on someone else’s server as is typical for today’s cloud computing approaches.
I have to agree with James, though for different reasons. The Courier represents the next step in what Microsoft has been calling NUI (Natural User Interfaces) and combines pen and touch in a way that can’t be done on the iPad or Android Tablets on anything except for an app by app basis. If the actual product pulls of the user input half as well as they show in the proof of concept videos then the Courier has the potential to be accessible to anyone who has ever used a paper notebook.
I wholeheartedly agree, and even then, the other devices can’t even possibly combine pen and touch on an app-by-app basis as well as the Courier if the Courier indeed uses a Wacom pen along with capacitive multi-touch.
James’ point about the paper day planner really resonates with me, because it makes me think of my mother.
She is about as tech-illiterate a person as you can get. Doesn’t even know how to switch the inputs on a TV for when she wants to watch DVDs instead of cable TV, barely uses her cell phone for more than phone calls, and she has a hard time using Windows XP.
It’s been a personal challenge of mine to find something that could replace her paper day planner. I tried it already with a Palm Tungsten|C, but even the Palm OS wasn’t intuitive enough for her to use. I saw a demonstration of the Apple Newton MessagePad 2000/2100 in action and thought I found it, but a little dabbling in Einstein revealed a year 2010 bug.
If the Courier can match the ease and simplicity of use of that paper day planner-flip to a given day, find a time slot, just write in the name of whoever has an appointment-then I’m sure it’ll be a hit, and perhaps the first digital device to displace pen and paper for the masses, where Tablet PCs are too complicated, bulky, expensive, and lacking battery life. In short, we’re looking at PDA 2.0.
Maybe that’s the Next Big Thing in mobile technology right there-something designed to be as intuitive and flexible as pen and paper throughout the OS, interface, and apps, but with all the advantages of digital mediums such as search and easily reconfigurable views of the same data.
If you ask me, the next big thing in mobile is speed and ubiquity. There are all sorts of what I’ll call ‘prototype’ advanced services out there – streaming video, MobileTV, on-demand movie subscriptions, true fixed-mobile convergence etc. I call them ‘prototypes’ because, while you can use them, very few people actually do, and they are certainly not all available every where you go, and aren’t capable of delivering the kind of quality that makes them truly enjoyable or even useful.
4G broadband might change that. The increased speeds might actually mean that a significant number of people start using these ‘prototype’ services, like mobile video conferencing/calling, hi-def streaming movies, online mobile gaming (of games you might actually want to play at a quality that makes them fun). When you can really access the kind of computing services that you can get on a desktop or laptop over a wi-fi or fixed connection, and do so ANYWHERE, our business, social and mobile lives will start to really change.
Of course, 4G might not get us there completely…
But anyway, speed and ubiquity – that’s the NBT to me.
Data display glasses fed by virtual reality data streams.
Although I usually agree with the vast majority of your views I will have to totally disagree on this. If you think today’s iPad is not the NBT that you just need to hold your horses and wait until iPad 2. I predict version 2 of the iPad will be even more popular than the first as everyone who ever touches the thing becomes under its spell. I have entered a total hypnotic state since I got my iPad and anyone that I let touch the thing for a few minutes wants one very badly. The last time I have witness such broad addiction to something like this was with console video games (starting with Atari thru Xbox). Mark my words The iPad 2 will be the NEXT BIG THING !
iPad is not groundbreaking because of the form factor, but because of something else: the decision by Apple that the mobile OS will be the vehicle towards the future of mobile (dare I say mainstream?) computing and not the desktop OS. That, along with their belief that desktop class software can be rewritten under the new paradigm. This is important. So for me the NBT will come from the software front. Will the major players of the software industry adopt the new model? Will they adopt it?
The experience you get from an ipad-like device is so much different than from a standard desktop. It is a refinement, an evolution of personal computing. Highly efficient and radically different in terms of human interaction. But it cannot grow into something important without some serious sw development. So the NBT IMO is the new generation of software.
One more thing: cloud. Cloud services for sync and backup must become the norm, get into the hands of the many. All major platform builders must include their cloud services as a standard feature of their platforms. Only then will the average user become accustomed with it and make it standard practice. The cloud is a critical component of mobile computing.