Attendees arrive at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain(Photo: Edward C. Baig)
BARCELONA —You're pretty satisfied with the smartphone in your pocket, especially if you got it in the last year or so. The screen is lovely. The device is relatively zippy. The camera takes perfectly acceptable pictures and video.
Yeah, you groan here and there about a missing feature, declining storage, or — the complaint I still get most — a battery that dies too soon. But none of these things is driving you to upgrade. Where's a killer feature when you need one?
Reaching folks like you is a tall order for the companies exhibiting here last week at Mobile World Congress, from a market leader like Samsung, which unveiled its latest flagship Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge devices, to any number of handset makers who don't have near the resources or clout of the South Korean tech giant.
Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge (Photo: Robert Deutsch, USAT)
It's apparently becoming more of a challenge for Apple, too.
To be sure, smartphones almost always get better through each model step-up, and with beefier specs.
Still, it's worth asking: is better, better enough?
"The challenge is how do you make money in an environment where everyone can source components that are good enough?" asks Avi Greengart, an analyst with Current Analysis.
Indeed, smartphone innovation appears to have run smack into a great big wall, with most tech breakthroughs hitting other corners of tech, such as autonomous cars and virtual reality.
According to Gartner, global sales of smartphones grew by just 9.7% (to 403 million units) in the fourth quarter of 2015 over the same period last year, the slowest rate of growth since 2008.
'Is there anything different?'
"I was just in the car with our head of engineering reading out specs of one of the launched phones here and it was like, `Is there anything that's different?' And the answer is it's really hard to tell," says Rick Osterloh, president and chief operating officer of Motorola, now owned by the Chinese tech company Lenovo.
Motorola didn't launch any major new devices at MWC, though Osterloh says, "We think we're working on some stuff that is really interesting innovation that will hopefully change things in the coming future." He wouldn't elaborate.
"5G allows lots of different industries to join mobile"
Qualcomm Chief Technology Officer Matt GrobAnother Chinese company, Huawei, now the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, also didn't announce major new smartphone hardware, pushing instead a Windows 10-based tablet hybrid called MateBook.
Colin Giles, an executive vice president at the company, says Huawei has been concentrating on smartphone fundamentals: in camera, display, battery, fast charging and performance management. "Now as Huawei becomes the clear number three (in global share), the responsibility turns to us as one of the market leaders to do more in terms of our innovation." Giles says Huawei devotes 16% of revenues to R&D.
LG's removable battery
One company that actually revealed something different at the show is LG. Its new G5 is built around a "modular" design, in which you can remove a bottom piece of the phone, slide out the battery and slide in accessories, for starters a camera module (with extra battery), and a module featuring high-res audio. LG's approach is interesting and bears watching, but the idea of bolting on accessories, however it is done, isn't entirely novel.
The LG G5 phone features a modular design. (Photo: LG)
The approach that HP is taking with the HP Elite x3 Windows 10 phone that launched here isn't entirely a new concept either. But the pitch behind this robust Windows 10 phablet, which is due out this summer and for now anyway squarely aimed at enterprise customers, is that through the Windows 10 technology known as Continuum and optional accessories, a single device can serve as your phone, your notebook and your desktop computer. There's no guarantee though that Windows 10 phones will gain any meaningful traction.
Phone designs inevitably change over time, sometimes more dramatically than other times. Manufacturing tweaks lead to curved glass and edges. Do phones with flexible displays have a future? Or phones that exploit multiple displays? Samsung devoted a little more space on the S7 edge to the secondary "edge" display that can take over part of the main 5.5-inch screen.
Speculation is that after enlarging the size of its screens with recent iPhones, Apple may go small again with models that could launch next month.
Materials can change, too. Manufacturers use high-quality metals. Or in the case of the new top end flagship XI 5 from China's Xiaomi, a ceramic body. (The phone is not slated for the U.S. market anytime soon.)
"You haven't seen massive change in hardware. It's a piece of glass," says Glenn Lurie, President & CEO of AT&T Mobility. "Now we're starting to talk about where the apps world goes, where does the cloud come in, what's going to happen behind that piece of glass to make it more valuable?"
Indeed, with all the fuss surrounding hardware, any advances on the software side or with the apps ecosystem are equally crucial. So, too, with the networks.
At MWC, there was a lot of activity around the 5G type networks that Verizon and AT&T start running tests on in the U.S. this year. But commercial viability for 5G doesn't likely arrive until 2020, and even with the faster speeds and lower latencies that 5G promises, the more major impact goes beyond the handset, whatever a handset looks like four years out.
"The biggest message is 5G is a lot more than just faster," says Qualcomm Chief Technology Officer Matt Grob. "If you think of what the smartphone did to many other consumer electronic products like cameras, camcorders, voice recorders, VCRs, GPS navigation, it basically sucked them all in. 5G allows lots of different industries to join mobile."
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
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Source: Smartphone innovation hits a wall
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