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| Make a quad-core phone make sense with modular computing |
Mobile World Congress 2012 brought us a very large amount of new products. Most of the high-end models were based on a quad-core processor, and all mid-range models used dual-core. The tech press is mostly impressed with the lineup from LG, HTC, Huawei and ZTE and I’m personally looking forward to spending more time with the HTC One X. So all should be well and good, right?
No, there is a large problem. The mobile tech world is more and more about specs. This has been coming for some time. When the dual-cores CPU for mobile was introduced nobody asked how it should be used. Everybody just loved the fact that their mobile now could have a dual-cores processor. Now we have quad-core processors, and still nobody is trying to explain to the customers what it supposed to do for them.
The evolution of the mobile market the last 1 - 2 years is starting to look a lot like the PC market did 4 years ago. The high-en models are so powerful that only games can manage to utilize all that power. No normal app has the need for quad-core processing power, and the manufactures have a hard time explaining to the customer why they should buy high-end model. The reaction from the customers back then was to buy Netbooks in large amounts.
If this is not too happen in mobile, company's like Samsung, HTC and LG needs to very quickly come up with something that make sense to the customer. Games are all well and good, but it’s not enough. There needs to be some type of app or user scenario that validates the quad-cores phones in the market place. It’s not something they have the time to figure out over the next 1 - 2 years. No, these very powerful phones are coming to a store near you in 2 - 4 months.
Last year I did a post on what I expected the processing power of a quad-core processor would be used for in a phone. I only did the post in Danish so I’ll list the highlights here.
- Games
- User interface enhancements
- Video, photo and sound editing
- Improved voice control
- Modular computing
Some of these things need apps from third party developers and some relies on Google and improvements in Android. The last thing, modular computing, will only happened if somebody educates the customers and shows them how it’s done.
I’m not sure who that someone should be, but manufactures are going to lose the ability to sell high-end phones in maybe 1 - 2 years if the other things on my list do not succeed to move the market. I believe that the manufactures of Android phones are in a unique position to do something very different right now. Apple owns the tablet market, and Microsoft is about to eat up what is left of it. Microsoft and Apple is the only contenders in the desktop OS world and no new OS is about to change that. Android is growing in the mobile space and needs to do something new to keep growing.
Google should stop trying to make Android a tablet OS, if they really ever started, and focus on mobile. Introduce either a dual-boot system in Android, or use Chrome as a springboard to improve the modular computing experience. Google also need to work with accessory manufactures to build docks and keyboard/mouse solutions that make the transformation of your phone to a computer easy and not too expensive. This way Google with Android and the manufactures building the phones can look to expand where there is no competition. Make modular computing popular and quad-core phone will seem like a logic choice to the customers, and keep them asking for more.
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