I moved to New York in October 2010 and was without my smartphone for several weeks. Initially, the thought of not having a phone sent me into paroxysms of panic: what if someone needed to contact me? About that thing? At that place? I knew a sum total of one person in New York (my girlfriend), and she was within ear shot most of the time, but the situation still induced a testerical tantrum. I soon came to realize that I had somehow developed the perception that my phone was indispensible to my lifestyle, which was simply not true. I survived most of my life without one, and I was relatively successful at establishing myself in a new city while phoneless. I soon recognized that rather than being a solution to a problem, my smartphone was merely a convenience, and I had imagined a suitable degree of inconvenience in my life in order to justify having a phone.
The exponential increase in phone functionality is something of a ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum: is the functionality there because we as users need it? Or do we use it simply because it’s there? The smartphone itself is an impressive device in that it provides the ultimate in convenience. It’s the convergence of your phone, computer, camera, address book, calendar, music, maps, games, the list goes on. But some of these programs can even be utilized via other platforms sometimes more effectively. So the question is: which features do we really need on our phone?
Compulsively checking email, twittering our every thought, bringing engaging conversations to a screeching halt to find out what Google thinks of something rather than trusting our own opinion… It’s behavior that’s transforming us into creatures of action and reaction rather than contemplation and consideration, and we’re more dependent than we think.
According to Pew, 87% of smart phone owners access the Internet or email on their handheld, including 68% who do so on a typical day. When asked what device they normally use to access the Internet, 25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer. Are people even making phone calls with their phones anymore? Not too many. One in three Americans who use text messaging would rather text then talk, and according to data released by JD Power, fewer calls are being made or received, with the average monthly call volume down to 450 minutes (from 527 in 2009).
The Bauhausians among us would claim that a device is typically named after it’s primary function, so when the ability to make a phone call is but a tiny percentage of the functional capacity of modern phones, how long until we cease to consider it a phone? We’re at the cusp of transition from the old taxonomy to the new; mobile phones and wireless networks led to the dropping of the ‘tele’ suffix from ‘telephone’, Apple’s decision to exclude an optical drive from the latest MacBook Air and Mac Mini (and to drop the CD from the iTunes logo) heralds the continued obsolescence of physical media for content distribution.
So when is a phone not a phone? Someday not long from now I predict we will have a new name for our phones. Will it come from a major player, someone with enough market clout and cache to carry it off? We all know how consumers react to self-imposed monopolies and proprietary formats (Microsoft, Sony, I’m looking at you). I doubt any of the mainstream manufacturers will be able to pull it off; it will need to be an outlier, adept at surfing the zeitgeist wave and defining the cultural taxonomy in its wake. The obvious candidates right now are Google and, perhaps even more likely, Apple. Don’t be too surprised if the next-to-next iteration of the iPhone drops the ‘phone’ part altogether.
So what else can we call it? It can’t be gimmicky or pseudo-cool or brand-driven; it has to be a term that is universally accepted but innocuous enough to not carry any polarizing connotations for the user. We don’t need a new paradigm; we simply need a convenient term of reference. Ask yourself: what is it that we use our phones for these days? What’s the primary function? Communication. Maybe I’m letting my geek flag fly, but I credit the creators of Star Trek for their prescience by inventing the hand-held communicator. Or more succinctly, The Comm. “Honey? Have you seen my comm?” “Dude, check out my new comm!” “$#%! I dropped my comm in the toilet!”
I like the way that sounds. It sounds like the future. Just remember you heard it here first.
