Originally Posted by
mooper
I differ if you consider the rapidly expanding current and future uses of phones. As they get more powerful processors, they become more capable of handling tasks such as being an "automated assistant" ala Google Now and Siri.
I'm tempted to compare the features as they exist now to pet rocks.
Moreover, Siri at east (I've not looked as heavily into Google Now) pretty much is entirely server side, and the fact that it "won't run on the older iPhones" is entirely market segmentation on Apple's part, not a tech issue.
Also, I believe that various devices are merging into one, with the only differentiation being screen size. For example, if mobile phones get just a bit more powerful, they can do everything a tablet computer can, just on a smaller screen.
Uh, that's pretty much already the case. The screen size and resolution IS the only big difference, although many tablets are faster just because it's easier to make somethingg that size (and with a much bigger battery) faster. OTOH, there are a lot of applications where the physical real estate both for the screen and the touch area really make a difference.
It's never going to be comfortable to hold a 4" phone close enough to my face to read comic books a full page at a time, despite the fact that a Galaxy S3 has more than enough resolution to do exactly that.
With data synced and stored among devices using the cloud, you can move from a phone to a tablet to your primary computer (or even your TV and home automation/control device down the road) by doing nothing more than switching screens.
I'm rather less sanguine on the cloud; why not just share storage locally, where you're not at the mercy of the reliability of both cloud provider, and internet provider to get to the cloud provider? Regardless, convergence of that sense makes sense, although getting the disparate OSes to play nicely together is an as-yet unsolved problem (not so much technically but from a market coordination standpoint.)
You'll make phone calls from your TV just as easily as you'll turn on your home alarm from your phone. My point is that more powerful capabilities for the smaller devices give them more possibilities when integrated into broader uses.
None of that vision requires even as much power as the present generation of devices have; you're fine back pretty much to the first generation of dual core devices over a year ago.
It won't be long before the subsidies and progression in technology combine to make very capable phones affordable.
I agree with the latter, but not with the former; we've seen escalating subsidies the past few years, but at least in the US I don't see the stomach for ETFs going up yet further, or even greater escalation in data plan costs to cover the greater subsidy. If anything, the improvement in technology and broadening of markets to parts of the world where carrier subsidies are less well establish are also going to work in favor of cheaper phones, not the continued escalation in the high end.
I see it already where I work in silicon valley; there are users who are upgrading, including to the iPhone 5 (and Galaxy S III), mostly on the "ooh, it's shiny" factor, while an awful lot of others are pretty happy with the phones they have now -- on the iPhone, back to the 4, and Android, basically to anything much less than two years old.
PCs face the same issue; desktops and laptops have been peaked at "enough power for pretty much any normal use" for about six years now in the high end, and most of what we've seen is costs going down and those high end specs moving cheaper and cheaper rather than escalating power levels. Even Microsoft hasn't been able to really do much to push "must have a more powerful machine" the way they did in the past.