The battle for your hands and pockets has reached fever pitch as the apparent pinnacle of our technological civilisation, The Smartphone, has reached a plateau in innovation.
Actually that's slightly disingenuous; there is still massive innovation happening in the industry, but it appears to appeal solely to phone geeks. Thinner screens, increased battery life, better cameras, better graphics, improved UX - all good. But who’s impressed?
Meet the new phone, same as the old phone.
However as was seen with the Galaxy S4 and to an extent the IPhone 5 launch the blogosphere, if not the public, are getting increasingly nonplused about our current crop of top end handsets.
We’ve passed the point where these new devices will dramatically change your life. Sure, you still have ‘new phone smell’ but its impact has diminished over time since that first blissful app purchase. They’ve even lost social talkability - they won't make you the coolest kid on the block as you join the daily telephonic beauty parade with your friends - unless you are a rebel of course with a Blackberry or Windows 8 phone where there might be some mild curiosity.
Faster! Lighter! Stronger! Longer Best yet! New & Improved! Blah
These aren't the words of innovation but iteration. To be honest it's more FMCG than Luxury IT. I can just see Don Draper getting his ‘creative’ on sketching out a fifties super-mom, next to the sink, vacuum cleaner strategically placed with the a new phone in one hand and Camel filterless in the other. ‘Because sometimes, a burden shared is a burden halved’.
Waiting in the wings of course is the next little thing. This year's arms race is the overabundance of smart watches to be strapped to us by year end. Of course for me, the last watch I wore was a Casio calculator watch in the eighties, so it offers the opportunity to relive my geeky childhood. The joke is of course this will reduce necessity to have the latest and greatest phone, placing it even further down your priority list.
So What’s the Story?
Microsoft launched its shiny new telly ad for the Nokia 920 this week: a mildly amusing fistfight between Apple and Samsung users at a wedding, with the strapline ‘Don’t Fight. Switch’. Pretty much describing Microsoft and Nokia’s own fortunes over the last decade. Should probably say ‘Switch back’. Even though it had ‘an idea’ it still left me cold so I decided to check out the various offline campaigns from the competition and was pretty horrified.
For once I'm going to have to use some visual aids: