It's just a phone

THE cellphone industry left off 2009 on a high note, having had a stellar year in which it not only weathered the downturn but saw growth in the lucrative smartphone end of the market where Apple, Nokia, BlackBerry and countless others now play. Business may have been less than amazing, but innovation was on overdrive.

Now the new year has kicked off, the 2010 market turned up to fever pitch as old and new players scramble for a slice of the hype and flood the market with new devices that promise to do everything short of solving global warming and delivering unto the world a biblical rapture.

Big things happened in cellphones over the last few years. Their cameras got better, they made use of more intuitive interfaces like touch, had GPS chips embedded in them and made the migration from tins-and-string to full-on pocket computers.

I'll be the first to admit being swept up by the hype and excitement of seeing Steve Jobs step on stage with the first iPhone in hand. I was blown away by BlackBerry's advancements in mobile compression and Nokia's innovations in bringing together mobile services on tiny, yet powerful devices.

Yes, it takes a geek to get excited about these things - but if you've read up until this point, you're probably just as deserving of the label as I am.

The nexus of hype

It all ended with Google's announcement of the Nexus One "superphone".

Google unleashed the Nexus One as if it was introducing the second coming.

"A new category of phone," said a Google spokesperson on CNN, using adjectives like "revolutionary" and "game-changing" to describe a phone that... well... does what all the others do - makes phone calls and connects to the internet.

The Nexus One is the epitome of industry hype for devices that really aren't that amazing. It has a touch screen, but not as good as the iPhone's. It has a powerful processor, but no more or less powerful than the Nokia N900.

It'll keep you connected to the internet 24/7, but not as affordably as the BlackBerry does. And it runs the open source Android operating system, just like two dozen other cellphones from half a dozen other manufacturers.

Really, the only remarkable thing about the Nexus One is that it's Google's first hardware device and will be sold directly on the Google website. But only in four territories - the USA, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore.

It's just a phone. And you can't even have one, if you live in SA.

When Steve Jobs first presented the iPhone to the world, he really did have something to show off about. No matter what the Apple-haters tell you, the iPhone's touch interface was game-changing. Testament to this is the fact that every other manufacturer has been trying, and failing, to emulate it for the last three years.

The app store was another innovation that changed the game. And if you're one of the people who doesn't agree with that, just ask yourself why Nokia, BlackBerry and countless others have tried to copy it.

Tablets and 3-D TV now hot and happening

And it wasn't just Apple; Nokia Maps was another legitimate breakthrough other vendors have tried to match. Research in Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry service is winning it market share faster than you can say "broadband bonanza" - the latter can't even begin to be copied by other vendors, much as they'd like to try.

But until cellphones can be physically embedded in our brains, the hype is over. I still love a flashy new gadget as much as any other nerd. I get a kick out of using my iPhone's remarkably accurate voice recognition to dial numbers, of accessing Twitter and Facebook on my BlackBerry without worrying what it will cost and using the Nokia N900 to run powerful command-line Linux applications.

But whereas cellphones had a special place in the first decade of the 21st century, they're now just another burger on the menu of circuitry.

Google was too late to capitalise on the hype, and making up ridiculous new categories isn't going to change that. It also isn't becoming to Google, which we are used as more of a gentle internet giant than a go-for-the-gullet hardware vendor.

The excitement and anticipation has now shifted away from cellphones and onto next-generation internet tablet devices and 3-D televisions. This is a good thing. It'll inject some much-needed reality into the handset industry.

Manufacturing will settle down, along with prices, and we'll all benefit from the flurry of innovation that took place in the last few years. Cellphones will continue to change and improve, just like cars, fridges and desktop computers have - but now they're just phones again.

- Fin24.com