Gadgets Gizmos Gossip

Mobile technology has continued to evolve throughout the last few years, with Apple and Google’s Android operating system dominating the current market. But what’s the future of mobile technology? What does 2012 hold for the industry and its consumers?

Video encoding and transcoding company Guerilla have gone some way to answering those questions with the following infographic, originally published on their website:

The most interesting sections for me are on mobile TV (the market exceeding $15billion in 2012) and the integration of cloud computing into mobile devices, allowing all the data and complicated computing modules to be processed via the cloud and resulting in much faster performance for mobile users.

As always feel free to re-post the infographic above, just please link back here or to Gorillabox if you do!

As you might imagine we’re big fans of smartphones here at Gadgets Gizmos Gossip, with the majority of our team using their iPhone / Android phone to do everything from play games to publish blog posts. But it seems as though more and more of us are using our smartphones to make purchases online; a growing phenomenon highlighted by the Value Of Mobile Payments infographic, brought to us by Cashlog.

The infographic displays some phenomenal and fascinating statistics; particularly that mobile internet usage will exceed desktop usage by 2014.

The design also highlights some barriers to adoption when it comes to making purchases via mobile devices, with concerns over security being the most prominent.

If you’d like to repost this infographic on your own blog, feel free to do so, just please link back here or to the Cashlog website if you use it.

So, here’s a question for all the gadget fans: is Android unfashionable? At first it would seem like something of trick question. After all, the numbers most definitely tell us otherwise. Android is now the operating system installed on the majority of phones out there currently. But let’s backtrack on that a second: does ‘installed on the majority of phones’ mean the same thing as ‘fashionable’? After all, Android isn’t overtaking iPhone or Blackberry to take number one positon, it’s overtaking Symbian. Symbian is the operating system behind most phones from the last decade. Your mum probably has it on her phone. Your grandmother may even have it. That’s not especially ‘fashionable’, is it?

The Case of Blackberry

RIM’s mobile devices were most definitely fashionable, and you know what? I can’t explain for the life of me why this was the case. Ok, so the Blackberry messenger application kept many a financially unsound user from racking up bad credit over their text message bill, but the time of restrictive messaging allowances are now truely over. Everyone surely gets three thousand of the things. And when it comes to one important factor – the aesthetics – I simply cannot understand why people every found these ugly things attractive enough to swing them around like fashion accessories. Oh wait, the trend setters (reality show stars, pop-starlets) were probably paid to.

Regardless, Blackberries are kind of on the way out, but a much heftier opponent approaches.

Apple, the Undisputed Kings of the Smartphone?

Android has only one thing on iPhone. Fortunately for the members of the handset alliance, it’s the only thing that matters to most of us: Price. Want an Android, you get out your Credit Card. Want an iPhone, and you may as well ship in the gold bullion.

The problem is though, the iPhone does and always has looked like a million dollars. Its design philosophies are so radiant that they’ve seeped into every crack of the machine. Only Apple could sell you a device without an accessible battery and make you love it precisely because there’s no ugly seams to make your 2001-esque monolith of evolutionary thought look less striking.

Aesthetics

One of the most common criticisms (and arguably benefits) of android is the split nature of the platform. Most manufacturers have a high end version of their devices, and a low end version. You get whichever one your Vanquis card can stretch to. Some (like HTC) have high end, mid, low end devices and then just keep expanding upwards with variations on their most expensive models. By aesthetically? On the screen, the android UI ranges from pleasing (HTC sense) through ‘ok if you like blue’ (Sony Ericsson) through dull as dishwater (the default, as seen on the Nexus One). As for the cases of the phones themselves? There’s always some weakness or other. The HTC legend has a beautiful aluminium shell, but flimsy looking buttons. And the Galaxy S? Can you Say ‘Overgrown iPhone 3 Rip-Off’?

Conclusion

At the moment, I’d say that Android is at a crossroads. People who don’t care how their phones look have them, and people who love features AND aesthetics have them. But there’s no ‘wow! You have THAT phone’ factor. They’re not specifically fashionable, but they’re not yet unfashionable either.