That’s what Jason Perlow is saying here:
The bottom line is that the buying public has certain basic expectations of what needs to be in smartphones, and that water mark is already pretty high, and may have been reached as much as two years ago.
So that we aren’t treating the mainstream reviews as those that are anomalous, Mossberg and Pogue’s S4 viewpoints and commentaries are consistent with reviews that have been published on numerous technology reporting sites and enthusiast blogs, ZDNet included.
The smartphone device category is well-defined even within the sub-classifications such as phablets. You expect performance to be snappy regardless of how many cores are on the SoC that the phone uses, you expect the latest OS build.
You expect the rear-facing camera to take high-quality stills and video, you expect a front-facing HD camera for doing video chat, and you expect the device to have a high-resolution screen regardless of size that produces sharp, crisp video and has excellent color saturation and luminosity. And you expect the phone to be 4G LTE capable.
In the United States people upgrade their smartphones to the rhythm of their contract renewal with their carriers. In a mature market the way you get new customers is by convincing a customer who is using a competitor’s product to use yours. With smartphones the opportunity to do that occurs roughly every two years.
If this year’s phones have roughly the same performance and features that those two years ago did, it looks very much as though innovation in smartphones has slowed to a crawl or ended. IMO the next real innovation in smartphones will be form factor. Why, for example, are smartphones rectangular?
I’m still content with my iPhone 3GS. It’s a few years old, but it’s still doing all I need it to do.
I wouldn’t mind upgrading, mostly for the better camera options on newer phones, but there’s no compelling need. If a newer version of the iPhone 5 comes out this summer, I may opt for the original 5 as I’d expect a serious price reduction.
I do like the current rectangular format. It fits into the pockets in which I put it. A circular or triangular shape won’t, at least not while keeping the screen at a size I find useful.
I’d definitely go for some sort of full-sized keyboard I could use with the phone. I wouldn’t need it while on the move, but it’d make life easier when I was static.
Adding to the comments above, one of the issues signalling that the smartphone market is mature is APPL stock price performance. This is likely a valuation adjustment of the company due to the lower rate in the trajectory of the forward sales and cashflow growth. Smartphone prices are being hit and Samsung is a big player pushing international volume (more competition indicative of a mature mkt). Overall APPL performance is no longer riding on a rocketship — just solid. Thus, this is an indication of a mature market.
The next real innovation in the smartphone market could be a “Dick Tracy” watch (skeptical). Also, substitution is occurring through use of a smaller tablet or a mini pad which eliminates the keyboard issue that John mentions. This new use of tablets and minis hurts Smartphone demand (also Laptop PC’s).
PS Android guy with a Samsung smartphone and my wife has Google Nexus 7″ tablet that she adores.
The phones might be mature, but the users are not. Lots of people still dont have them and even more dont know how to use them for much. Lots of people over 60 still dont have email addresses. This makes me think there is still a bit of room for software improvements even if the hardware is close to mature. Also, when we skype with genius son when he uses his phone it is still pretty slow unless he is on wifi. I expect a thin film, foldable large screen/keyboard someday.
Steve
Only reason we replaced our iphone 4’s was because my wife’s stopped ringing and we wanted to get a new data plan. The iphone 5 is nice but the difference is pretty small – it’s faster and lighter.
Relevant to this discussion, Forbes article. Presented without comment.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2013/04/26/samsung-rises-to-nearly-double-apples-smartphone-sales/?utm_campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
One thing that bears mentioning. The marketing universe for any given product does not consist of the entire human race. It consists of everyone who a) has the money to buy the product and b) is willing to pay for it.
At the time of her death my mom, for example, did not own a cellphone, a personal computer, or even an answering machine. She’d been offered them repeatedly and refused them. She had a DVD player that she had only the most basic understanding of using.
The market for smartphones is limited to people with a certain amount of money, who live and/or work in range of cellphone towers, who have electrical power (they’ve got to be recharged), and who are interested in the services they provide, e.g. making calls other than to emergency services. That will always be less than 100% of the people. At this point I think the market is pretty much limited by the birthrate. Unless somebody can sell the idea that owning more smartphones is better.
Smartphones may or may not be a mature product – they’re not in the traditional sense; the market is still expanding greatly.
What Mr. Perlow means is that no one has come up with the next ‘killer feature’ for a smartphone. Blackberry made push email a ‘killer feature,’ allowing (at first) execs to get to their email instantly and tap out a typo-laden, short reply.
Apple added capactive touch, which made a more user-friendly UI and a software keyboard a realistic option. This enabled a larger screen, which also meant that browsing the ‘real web’ was a possibility – and so Apple brought over its decent browser engine, which also made the web a realistic possibility.
A year later, they added the app store, enabling developers to get in on the game. After that, nothing really- Android does some things better, some things worse, but the essential feature set is the same between all modern smartphone platforms.
I think there is more that can be done, but in 2005, it wasn’t obvious that capacitive touch was the next big thing. That’s why ‘innovation’ is more than just ‘iteration.’
I’m skeptical, TimH. There are about seven billion people in the world and six billion have cellphone accounts. In 2012 about 1.7 billion phones of all types were sold, under half of them smartphones.
Sales of Smartphones in 1Q2013 were about 180 million. Sales will need to increase rapidly to surpass last year’s. Sounds like a mature market to me. They’re squabbling about market share.