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Speaking at MobileBeat in San Francisco this week, Samsung’s Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) Omar Khan implied that smartphonese were passé, noting this year was the year of the superphone.
A superphone, said Khan, was a handset that put “the power of a netbook in the palm of your head,” could provide HD video and imaging, advanced browsing, HD gaming, integrated SNS and multi-tasking.
It wasn’t just the phone’s applications that made it so super, either. “It’s the year of four inch displays and gigahertz processors,” he declared adding that the world had come a long way in the last eight years in terms of processors and their capabilities.
According to Khan, over the past few years, user behavior has changed significantly too. Taking a cheeky prod at Apple’s hundreds of thousands of often trivial apps, Khan said that while flatulence on demand may have entertained people at one time, it was just a fleeting fad of an experience. Consumers were now looking for more meaningful mobile experiences, he posited.
“The quality of gaming on a smartphone goes a long way to differentiating and defining today’s superphones,” declared Khan, explaining that people were expecting exactly the same on their mobile four inch screen than they expected on their 10 inch netbooks.
The ability to deliver these experiences in uncompromised fashion, said Khan, would sort the men from the boys in terms of superphone leaders.
To this end, Samsung is plugging its four inch super AMOLED display Galaxy S handset running on a one gigahertz processors, in a super slim 9.9 millimeter body. The phone is launching across six carriers in the US and Khan said Samsung sees it as a tremendous opportunity to redefine the superphone space.
But to make a superphone truly super, Khan reminded the audience it was crucial the phone had the content to complement it. A combination of web apps and signature apps that can take advantage of both the hardware and the software would be ideal for the future.
According to analysts, consumer use of apps continues to skyrocket, growing at 427% a year, especially focusing on social apps and video.
People, says Khan, will demand increasing levels of multitasking ability and will also start sharing a lot more user generated video across mobile networks, which will push hardware specs forward.
Battery life, admitted Khan, was thus an issue and optimizing software and silicon to get more than a day out of a device would be key going forward.
“It’s about screen, speed, and content,” he emphasized.
The internet is also going to be critical to the new superphone species, with Khan announcing that by 2015, the average household will have 10 web-connected devices.
“One of the key things which connects all these connected devices is the web. Web will continue to be a very, very important factor in unifying user experience,” he said, before concluding, “but having said that, differentiation is still important.”
