What will you value in your smartphone in the next few years?
It will come as no surprise if a study on smartphone users reveals that the top five features used in mobiles do not include making calls. It is a guess, but not too far off the mark: The top five features will be texting, taking pictures, online shopping, watching videos, and browsing social media. Ironically, camera shipments have dropped from 120 million units in 2010 to a paltry 8.9 million in 2020. Yet, far from being on the decline, photography is rising to where visual pollution across media could become a psychological concern. Of the 1.43 trillion photographs taken in 2020, 90.9% were on phones, with digital cameras accounting for a low 7.3% and tablets for 1.8%. This should set everyone thinking — because everyone has a smartphone around which their lives revolve — about the future of smartphones.
Let us take a stab at it: Where are smartphones headed? In 2018, a newspaper in the Middle East asked me to make technological predictions. I had said that flip phones would make a comeback. And here we are, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold4 sells for upwards of Rs 1,50,000. In 2021, the Fold range sold 10 million units worldwide. Admittedly, I used the term “flip” phones, and what is taking over the world are “fold” phones. But let’s not split hairs; both words mean the same thing.
One of the top features of the Fold4 is the triple camera array, a 50 MP sensor, 1.8 μm pixel size for more light to be captured, and a 3X optical zoom. Nobody talks about the acoustic voice quality of smartphones; no one cares. The trend of major camera brands collaborating with smartphone manufacturers will continue to grow. Today it is Hasselblad teaming with OnePlus, Leica with Xiaomi, Zeiss with Nokia, then Sony and Vivo. Given the popularity of photography, it is worth pondering over why smartphones successfully become cameras while cameras fail to become successful phones. Do smartphone manufacturers have more credibility regarding technology than legacy names like Nikon, Cannon, Olympus, and Pentax? And why has Panasonic, a top camera brand with a range of smartphones, not capitalized on its dual capabilities?
The popularity of photography has spawned a massive market in mobile editing tools, both in-device and in the cloud. Adobe has a mobile version of Photoshop, which is still considered one of the best in the business. We will see amazing innovation in the camera + mobile space in the coming months as tiny start-ups innovate. Not only will things like image stabilization become commonplace, but more AI will be deployed to personalize pictures, scan images for object recognition (trees, hair, coffee), automatically optimize them for clarity, and determine how to categorize and store images.
Naturally, smartphones will not only double up as devices to capture memories and share them but also become personal assistants, money minders, personal safety devices that can sense when the user falls and fails to recover, setting off an automated alert for help, and monitor continuously for cardiac aberrations. They have become game and entertainment consoles, social interaction hubs, shopping portals, and expert navigators. These are natural, low-hanging fruit everyone wants to taste.
But the real future of smartphones is their environment-friendliness. Future models will be judged on their ability to use sustainable materials, use clean energy for manufacturing, and, once in the hands of consumers, use clean energy to recharge, and remain in a circular economy for long periods. My favorite is the refurbished phone of the circular economy. As a youngster, we would repair our thread-bare sneakers (then called canvas shoes), our leaking fountain pens, and our bursting-at-the-seams school satchels, using them for years. We need to restore pride in the culture of repair and restore.
Refurbished phones have a triple impact (like anything in the circular economy). They eliminate waste, are exceptionally low on creating new emissions, and reduce the burden on our natural resources. I would have liked to see global standards for the “ease of repairability” emerge so that smartphones can be officially certified for ease of repairability, leading to responsible purchase choices. Repairability scores are becoming available, but they are rudimentary and will, hopefully, evolve rapidly.
For the moment, we can see how the pressure of sustainability is already shaping the future of smartphones. The iPhone 13 Pro is made from 99% recycled tungsten, 100% recycled gold plating on the main logic board, and 98% recycled rare earth elements. Even its packaging is from recycled wood fiber. Apple also provides the phone’s lifecycle emission metrics, like airlines provide the emission information of their flights for customers to make better-reasoned flight choices. Apple is not alone. There are other brands, such as Fairphone, that use sustainable manufacturing practices. The results of a small discrete choice experiment in Ireland, published in September 2022, showed that, on average, households will pay €77 more for each ton of CO2 reduced. The study points out that the results show “a willingness to pay for a public good.”
The future of the smartphone is anyone’s guess. We know the possibilities it presents have barely been scratched. But as users, we can dictate the future — and the most urgent message we must send out is to bring sustainability to the top of the feature list.
