Megasomething Overkill

If you want to sell something to men, just give them continuously improving numbers in specifications. We want more power, less distortion, higher frequencies and longer runtime, even if we don't really need them. They are easy to compare and it's easy to prove that we have something better than the other male.

Every now and then, something becomes such overkill that nobody cares about it anymore. Take camera resolution. My first camera had two megapixels. With such resolution, you could only do standard size photos without too much cropping. With every next generation of cameras, resolution went up. Somewhere around eight megapixels people stop caring. It was good enough for all practical purposes.

Last week's launch of Samsung Galaxy S III made me think about smartphone specifications. 1.4 GHz quad-core processor. How many cores and at which frequency do you have inside your laptop and desktops? How fast were first Cray supercomputers with liquid cooling? I'm risking to sound like Bill Gates, but 1.4 x 4 should be enough.

With release of iPhone 4s most of the specifications becomes saturated: processor was fast enough for almost every imaginable task, screen had finer resolution than human eye could see, and camera made brilliant shots. Yes, screen could be a bit bigger, phone could be a bit lighter and batteries could run a bit longer, but all in all, we don't need much more. It even recognized speech and had super-powerful 3D graphics.

Today's generation of Androids matches and even transcends it. It is not surprising that S III didn't surpassed competitor's specifications by huge margin: there is not much left to add. So where to go from here?

One thing that I expect in future are more sophisticated features. Smartphones will become more fuzzy, more integrated with our senses. New Samsung Galaxy S III fits this nicely (if you want to learn more about significance of S III, read excellent Joe Wilcox's article at betanews). Those who cannot afford to develop such machines will be damned to production of cheap, but also sufficiently powerful phones. In time, super-phones will become commodity.

Or it could be something completely different. Smartphones screens are limited by dimensions of our hands and pockets, so future top of the line devices could become something like Google's or Epson's glasses. Thinking about it now, Google's decision to go with Project Glass looks to me much less adventurous and much more logical.

Hint to manufacturers: make something for nearsighted people, we are used to wear glasses all the time.


Those 2-megapixel sensors still have purpose - as puny smartphone front camera.

Photo credit: Google