Why the Smart Phone Wars are Over

By Rich Woods
http://rwoods716.wordpress.com

My first smart phone was an iPhone 3GS that I found in the street. I never went to AT&T to try to get service for it because I thought they would take it away, but I used it on Wi-Fi for a while and found that it immediately took control of my life. Finally, wanting to try the Android platform, I got an account with AT&T and got myself a Samsung Captivate, the first of a very long line of Galaxy S phones from Samsung. Disappointed in a glitchy phone/OS combo, my next upgrade was to the iPhone 4S and for the last 14 months, I’ve been watching the market deciding what my next pocket sized gadget is going to be. Do I stay with my trusted iPhone? I’ve never had a problem with iOS and the iPhone 4S is an amazing phone. Do I give Android another try? I’ve heard they’ve made some great improvements since Gingerbread. There’s always the Windows Phone 8 and the Nokia Lumia 920 which is one phone that I fell in love with in the store.

Then came Samsung with the announcement of the Galaxy S4. The plethora of new features on the S4 left me wondering, what do I really need in a smart phone? I definitely don’t need one that does the things that the S4 does. I’ve been hearing from everywhere that there is no more innovation at Apple and they are falling behind. But why? What exactly is the iPhone lacking? Near field communication? The ability to share a picture or a playlist with another user by tapping phones? Samsung loves to play up that feature of their phones but I’ve never actually met someone with a Galaxy that even uses it.

So then the question arose: Do I even need to upgrade at all? Samsung just showed us all that there are not many features left that we even need in a smart phone.

If you listen to tech news, it’s mostly speculation about what is going to be coming out soon, from iOS 7 to Android 4.3 to Windows “Blue”. While the tech news outlets are speculating what the average consumer wants from an operating system, I don’t think that the average consumer cares which operating system they’re using at all. People ask me quite often which phone they should buy and I always ask them the same question: “What do you use your phone for?” The answer is almost always the same. They want a phone that they can make calls on, send messages from, listen to music, watch YouTube, and play games. Any new phone can do all of those things and they can do them well.

At this point it seems that the smart phone market has matured to the point that we have all that we need from a phone. There is not much more to do with a 4 or 5 inch screen and consumers will begin to realize just that. Tablets are another story all together. There is a lot more that can be done on a 10 inch screen than on a 4 inch screen and we can still plan to see much more from that market for a few years to come.