On January 8th 2007 in the MacWorld conference held in San Francisco, Steve Jobs was very sure he was making history and he was so confident of it that he started the event with the following words: ” Good Morning, so thank you, thank you for coming, we are gonna make some history together today” he was about to reveal the iPhone to the whole world.
A couple of days ago 6 years passed since June 29th 2007, the date the first iPhone was released, and it would be fair to say it´s also the 6th birthday of the touch smartphone as we know it. Some months ago I watched again the first iPhone presentation by Steve Jobs, you can notice the strange reaction of the people, on some things they were astonished, on others they couldn’t really understand what was going on, the shock was too big.
The iPhone was the first phone with a comfortable entire touch screen, allowing the user to change the way mobile phones were used till then and starting a whole new mobile revolution that is far from ending anytime soon. The first generation phone was very basic when compared to the newest iPhone 5, some specs got duplicated, and some others are even 3 or 4 times better. Like for instance the camera was 2 megapixels without being able to record video at all, and the newest iPhone has an 8 megapixel camera with support for full HD video recording at 30 frames/s.
Nowadays, although 75% of the smartphone + tablet market is estimated to be running with Android devices, 58% of the devices that connect to the internet are using iOS from Apple and only 20% are devices using Android, this is worldwide.
All mobile producers owe Apple the respect of being the first one on the market releasing the most complete smartphone at the time, and nowadays Apple still has a very important portion of this market. All other brands released their flagship phones in the same line the iPhone is, but even after Steve -the legend- Jobs passed away, Apple kept improving its best selling product from all time. Some people (including me) think a new revolution is about to start in the following 6 to 12 months, the smartphones have reached a level of specs that have become standards for any top of the line mobile, but nothing really revolutionary has been presented lately.
What about the future?
There are rumors that Apple´s next iPhone will include a finger print reader, and let me say, this would start this second smartphone revolution. Imagine if you could use your mobile phone to do other things, like paying at any place, or to open doors, cars, and integrate the device even more with your day to day life. Imagine the integration of the phone with a smart watch enabling you this and much more. For Apple and Android devices the use of the smartphone as a payment gateway is not so far from becoming a reality, they already have several million credit cards associated to millions of Apple iTunes and Google Play stores accounts, so the transition to stop using credit cards and start using the phone as a real effective payment method is closer than what you think. And not only the big fruit company is thinking on this, other providers like Samsung, HTC and Google (though Motorola) are rumored to be testing this.
Limited battery life has become a real problem because of the high energy demand from the newest processors and the high definition displays. What if the next generation batteries are produced with graphene, a material we talked about before. This material would allow the re-charge of the device in just seconds. Also using this material (that is 100 times more strong than steal) would also allow us to have super durable devices.
Or maybe a self-winding system (like some watches have) could be incorporated on the device, so that with the movement of your body you could automatically re-charge your device, voluntary or involuntary.
Take a look at the first announcement of the iPhone and you will probably be as surprised as I was when you check the reaction of the public to things that nowadays are common, but at that time no one did before:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2MOwQ089eQ
You can check NetMarketShare.com for mobile usage stats. And the iPhone Wikipedia link where you can see all the specs of all the iPhones released till now.