The smart phone industry is heading for exhaustion

On August 13th, the "Business Weekly" website published a review article titled "The smartphone industry is depleted". The full text is summarized as follows:

This year, many electronics enthusiasts are eagerly looking forward to the next major event in the IT world, but they only look forward to the game.

Of course, this does not mean that there are no good new devices on the market. HTC One, BlackBerry Z10, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Moto X are all very good phones. Consumers may be very happy to buy any of them.

Although companies have carried out lavish publicity on each mobile phone, although mobile phones have new and dazzling features, although executives spend several months publicly discussing their next-generation products, none of the devices produced this year are as they say. Like that brings innovation to the market. There is not much difference between these products. Apple may have been a leader in market competition in 2007, but since then, its rivals have also caught up.

For most people, these phones all play the same role. They can run applications, browse the Internet, watch videos, send and receive emails, and play mini-games. As to how much money a user spends on buying a cell phone, it is not important for the cell phone manufacturer to declare how many special features the product has. Today's smart phones are much the same. And the concept of "smart phone" is no longer viable.

For some people who are concerned about the mobile phone industry, it is very disappointing to see that the current mobile phone companies are still doing what Apple had done six years ago. This is almost ridiculous.

Last week, LG released its new flagship product G2. However, its most prominent feature turned out to be that the volume control was set under the camera lens on the back of the phone.

Nokia's new Lumia 1020, released last month, is equipped with a 41-megapixel camera, but this feature is too high-end, most people do not need, let alone users have to spend an additional $ 100 for this.

Samsung's new product, the Galaxy S4, may be the most unsatisfactory. This product contains too many useless gimmicks, such as gesture sensing and eye tracking. These features will not make the phone better, but will only make the phone more complicated and difficult to use.

There are many similar examples, all of which prove that the surprising new features claimed by smart phones today do not exist. They are just mobile phones. What the smartphone market calls “a new era of mobile computers has come” is just a gimmick.

At the same time, after looking at the entire smart phone market, it will be found that the high-end market is already approaching saturation, which means that users who need iPhone 5 or HTC One, these high-end mobile phones, have already purchased the products they need. The two giants of Apple and Samsung have occupied too much market share, and it seems unlikely that a third company will emerge and win a place.

Therefore, Nokia and other companies are making large-scale investments in the low-end smartphone market. The production of these low-end products costs only a few hundred dollars, but they still provide the full functionality of the Microsoft Windows Phone 8 operating system. Apple will also release a low-cost iPhone later this year, and Samsung has also mass-produced several relatively inexpensive versions of the Galaxy.

Of course, this does not mean that people will stop buying mobile phones (they will not), nor does it mean that mobile phone companies produce very poor products (they are not bad). But now that there are few products in the smart phone market, it is a very foolish behavior for mobile companies to create some useless gimmicks in order to differentiate themselves.

The mobile device industry continues to grow, but "smart phones" have already existed in name only.

Steve Kovac, the author of this article, is a senior editor of the BusinessWeek website and is responsible for news reports in the technology industry.