Give into the night....

i just saw a commercial where a dude with a feature phone got hosed trying to to a girl with a smart phone. The commercial was best buy piggy backing off the EVO and was really stupid but it is a milestone in my eyes.

These commercials are posed to influence people on a almost instinctual level. The message is "you need a smart phone to attract members of the opposite sex". This message has been applied to so many products over the years from cars, to clothes, to sunglasses, to beer, the list goes on. On the surface most people disregard this message and laugh at the commercial. However ad agencies aren't successful by luck, they study statistics relentlessly. Advertising is a purely empirical world so if you see a commercial advertising a reputable company it's likely they are paying a large ad company lots of money to disseminate this seemingly stupid and juvenile message. They aren't doing it because they personally believe the message or think the target audience will take the face value of the message, it's because the ad agency has the statistics to back up the approach. However this approach doesn't always work, it really depends on where the product or service is in market acceptance. You won't see this approach with the slap chop or snuggie because they are small niche gifts. Until today i didn't think I'd see it used for cell phones.

In this example the milestone is that smart phones have reached a point where they are approaching mainstream. We can thank Apple, HTC, and Google for this. I personally can not wait to see what second quarter cell phone sales figures look like. Not only for the always interesting war between android and apple, but also for more eye opening figures of how much smart phones are gaining on feature phones. Everyday i hear about people moving from features to smart phones. I also hear more about people switching from iphone to android. Just today i talked with a colleague of mine who has an iphone for 3 years at least. I asked him if he would be getting the new iphone. He said no, that even though the new iphone looks considerably better than his current model, he is much more likely to jump ship and get the HTC incredible. He mentioned AT&T's poor service and Apple's overbearing need for control as the two influences in his decision. I immediately encouraged his intentions citing the many pro's of the incredible.

Feature phones will be a severe minority in the world of mobile communications. It is merely a matter of time, and i can not wait. The larger the market the more services and companies will cater to it. The last player will obviously be the government but imagine a world where all you need to leave you house is your cell phone. Life will simplify. Clothes will change. Garments with multiple pockets will become unnecessary. However purses will still hold on but the ratio of useful contents to useless will decrease exponentially. A good question is will wallets or coin purses that match the main purse still be manufactured and sold? They will serve absolutely no purpose. I mean at that point neither does the purse but something has to match the shoes.

Japanesse style...

So the HTC EVO 4G launched today. I'd like to take a second to highlight how this phone is going to be a unique specimen in cell phone evolution. It has two cellular radios. One for 3G service which is pretty ubiquitous at this point and one that works with Spring's new WiMAX system which is only available in select cities. This phone is the most capable phone on the planet because it is the only phone that has the hardware, software, and network capability to engage in video conferencing. This is a huge step from what Alexander Graham Bell developed in 1875. But Ironically this device will use this capability the least out of the tons of other things it can do. Simply because communication is a two way street. There has to be another person with an equally capable device to make this work. Since the EVO is the only one, there will be very few options for using this. Not only that but both callers have to be in the right city, that and they won't be able to chat for that long since the 4G radio and the bandwidth necessary for video conferencing are both extremely battery heavy. Don't get me wrong i think this technological direction is inevitably awesome and will be common place in 2 years. But now that Froyo can give you 100% of the internet in the palm of your hand the bulk effort of the market needs to shift. The software and hardware of the mobile world has been shot out of a cannon in the 2 years and has left both the communication infrastructure and the power supply technologies in the dust. Again i don't want to give the wrong impression. I think it's great that i all i have to consider before trying something on my phone is "is this activity worth the battery?" not "i wonder if my phone will be able to do this". It's like doing a steam vs. recovery or overhead purity study on a LPG fractionation column every time i decide to turn on the GPS for some reason. The fact that the software has out developed the infrastructure is really no surprise. I may be making a novice statement but to me Software engineering is different from all other disciplines because there are no physical unknowns. It is all a matter of generating the right code. The other disciplines are always struggling with discovering and understanding nature and the properties of materials and chemical and electrical systems. In fact years of engineering research can be exhausted only to find out that the original idea is not physically or economically possible, safe, or economically feasible. This is where the phrase "back to the drawing board". This is why the battery and the cell phone towers are now the limit to what we can do with mobile technology, these technologies rely on manipulating things in the physical world rather than the virtual world. The EVO 4G is a great step in mobile technology, but by the time the support systems necessary to facilitate everything it can do have caught up, this device will be a thing of the past.