There is mounting evidence that the smartphone era is fading. We examine what might come next
Any claim to have discovered the next big platform deserves caution. There have been plenty of false starts. Tablets were proclaimed as a rival to the smartphone, yet Apple still makes six times as much money selling iPhones as it does from iPads. Smart homes were seen as another possible mega-platform, but so far Alexa and her like serve mostly as jukeboxes and egg-timers.
What does seem to be under way, however, is a gradual movement by consumers towards a constellation of new wearable devices. These include voice-activated smart headphones, which can make calls, read messages and more, and smart watches, which handle scheduling, navigation and fitness. A growing array of health-tech gadgets measure everything from blood sugar to sleep patterns. In America unit sales of these “wearables” are already close to sales of smartphones.
These gadgets are more like accessories for the phone than replacements. But as computing shifts away from the pocket and towards wrists and ears, a growing share of consumers’ attention and spending is seeping away from the phone, too. Asglasses become lighter and cheaper, they could form the most powerful part of the wearable cluster.
People are not about to ditch their phones, any more than they threw out their laptops a decade ago. But as they interact more often with earphones or, soon, glasses, more of them will come to use their phone as a kind of back office, primarily there to provide processing muscle for other gadgets. As chips get even smaller, phones may not be needed even for that.
Don’t expect any of this to happen right away. Internet-enabled phones were launched in the late 1990s and failed to catch on outside offices.headsets—bulky, pricey and so far used only in industry—are at a similar stage. Yet when technological tipping-points are crossed, things can change fast. Four years after Mr Jobs introduced his iPhone, smartphones outsold all laptop and desktop computers worldwide. Silicon Valley’s latest great hope is still a work in progress.