Smartphones for "smart" users?

yeeeaah... not really, they are just users, smart or not. like before the web made internet ubiquitous (thats a smart word for "being everywhere"), like 10-12 years ago, computer users were expected to be smart people. Now computers are as commonly used by everyone as the TV (a.k.a the Idiot Box). Get the picture?

At the moment, what matters is, what would you use your smart phone for. Until now users choose smartphones for their "needs". But it will very rapidly become a "want". Remember a time when nobody thought they really need a mobile phone? Well by year 2010, analysts are expecting 250 million smartphones to be in the market. I think the number would be higher, probably much higher. Analysts often underestimate the irrationality of the mindset of general consumers when it comes to such gadgets.

So there is no doubt smartphones are quickly going to become mainstream. The real interesting thing for me would be, what sort of smartphones would become ubiquitous? The OS would be the key differential here. Eventually it comes down to the market penetration of the OS, the ease of use, the features, as I had been saying in my previous postings. Already Symbian has such high penetration that the common user doesnt know and doesnt care what OS their phone is running on. Why should they? they never have to install it, they never have to reformat their phone because it "crashed" again, they dont have to constantly keep it upgraded with patches, they dont have to keep worrying that their current version of Windows is so outdated or that their new Windows is still so buggy and unstable. They replace their phones long before they have to worry about its OS or utilities get outdated. And even if they dont replace it, it still works just fine for years even! Thats how comfortable the general Symbian users have been all this while, such that they didnt need to bother what OS they are on.

Actually its kinda funny that a good friend of mine (Alec Ee) has been using Treo for a couple of years (for the "non-smart" users, Treo uses Palm OS), simply because he had so many problems with their phones they always had to replace it for him within the warranty period, so he kept going with it. Until finally he had so many problems with Treo he recently bought himself an O². Today he just told me that he is so frustrated with the O², he has been checking out mobile phone shops to trade it in!

Bilal Zaheer
http://elanist.com/bilal