Is this actually true? My perception is that the smartphone bubble is bursting. Yes, there are lots more people to come online, but all they're going to do is use WhatsApp and Facebook.
The big disappointment of mobile is that all this stuff doesn't seem to result in enabling people to do their jobs better or more easily. Web apps really exploded with things like Basecamp, but the most mobile has brought along for that seems to be mobile email. (Edit to add, the only exceptions I can think of to this are actually the SMS apps deployed in the places pegged to explode in smartphone usage).
Having lots of people mindlessly addicted to notifications is not really that interesting.
Your focus on jobs and notifications is a little frustrating as there's a lot more to life than working. For example, I just traveled to the USA for the first time.
How do I get somewhere? Google maps will tell me the route, another app is telling me when the bus next comes.
Where should I eat in this brand new city? Yelp will find me somewhere good.
Coffee (I'm not a fan of American style drip coffee)? Yelp again.
What should I check out today? Originally fully researched before leaving the apartment/hotel, now I go to breakfast and look around, if it rains halfway through the day I can come up with a new plan that involves being inside.
Getting my boarding pass? No longer do I need to print anything, just show them my screen and they can scan the barcode off that.
Want to call home? No need for an expensive phone card, I can just use whatsapp or viber to chat to my parents.
Get in a cab and don't want to be ripped off because of accent? Maps again ("please take the FDR, the traffic there isn't too bad").
For work: My contract is currently approaching it's end, I managed to set up two interviews in my home from another country while on the go, never having to stop and pull out my laptop
I would say that without my smartphone I would have had to spend a lot of time asking locals, researching on a computer ahead of time, and generally looking like a tourist with a massive tourist map (a good way to get pick pocketed). As a result I was able to do most of my research on the move and really streamline my holiday to something where I didn't need to sit down for a couple hours each night to work out what to do tomorrow.
Completely agree with this. We've reached the same point we did with laptops a few years ago where making hardware more powerful doesn't improve the user experience much. Phones from different manufacturers are more or less interchangeable and there's not much incentive for an owner of last year's model to upgrade to this year's model. Both of the leading app stores are full of gimmicky junk and the leaderboards are increasingly stagnant. The prospect for indie mobile developers with new ideas is grim in 2014. Users are settling into patterns with a handful of established apps and it turns out there's just not that much you can do as a developer with nothing more than a 5" touch screen.
So I'm a contrarian even though I've been building mobile apps for the last four years. The desktop seems like both a vastly more interesting but likely also more lucrative place to be for a developer.
> "all this stuff doesn't seem to result in enabling people to do their jobs better or more easily..."
While I disagree with that notion, I also wonder why the focus on merely jobs. Smartphones and mobile devices have enabled people's lives to be much easier. Not more than 10 minutes ago I just determined the optimal route to a meeting, factoring in real-time traffic (measured by phones) and overlapping mass transit lines. If I'm late or my meeting partner isn't there ("there" being a location determined by ratings on Yelp's app, as the meeting was scheduled via my phone during another meeting), I have instant access to him and vice versa. Just the first example that comes to mind.
There are, literally, dozens of expensive devices that have been replaced by free/inexpensive smartphone apps in the past few years, to say nothing of smartphones enabling us to do things we never even thought of a few years ago. In 2014, it is possible for the middle class to take timelapse aerial video from a drone and edit/upload/share it remotely via phone in a matter of minutes. I cannot imagine what will be possible in a mere two years, when apps have replaced even more expensive things and enabled us to do things heretofore unconsidered.
I certainly don't have western tunnel vision. One of my favourite Android apps is this:
http://textit.in/
(Note where it's made).
The genius is you use it to provide services to people that only have SMS, and this is why the "smartphones will change everything" noise is misplaced, as the reality is north americans never lived in a context with a functioning SMS ecosystem thanks to having such inept telecoms regulators, so they just don't know what the rest of the world is like.
Well, I guess you've completely missed that it's not about improving work, it's about improving non-work such as entertainment, leisure and healthcare.
Work computers have remained relatively static by comparison in capabilities, numbers, usage and usage type.
Perhaps it is just me but I include "getting stuff done" as part of "work."
Perhaps it is just me but I find a smartphone incredibly useless for anything but the most passive of tasks.
If I want to "do something" I use a computer. "Something" being defined very loosely. Do rather than consume. Even doing something for leisure since 99% of "doing" tasks are very difficult to do on a phone for me - if that makes any sense.
I would agree with you, but the majority seems to be against us. Personally I find the usability on smartphones, and iPads, frustratingly poor. Even something like browsing the web is pretty much impossible, navigation is awkward, keyboard is rubbish and the speed is terrible. That being said I think there's only a few of us that forgo smart phones and tables for a laptop or even desktop PC.
Office workers however are most likely not going to swap out their PC in the foreseeable future, in terms of speed and usability their are still way ahead of any mobile device (laptops excluded of cause).
Yes, mobile is just as important, if not more, that PCs in some industries. If you do online commerce, entertainment and consumer facing services ignoring mobile would be foolish. For other industries you can safely ignore mobile for now.
Lets say I want to book a hotel. On a laptop or desktop I can do a few searches extremely fast, open up a few tabs and switch between them almost instantly to compare. My "work" gets done extremely quickly I am very happy with the results. Well I once had to book a hotel in a bar on my phone. Dreadful experience if you want to do any sort of comparison shopping at all, and I have a pretty new phone.
Of course mobile is extremely excellent for some things but very bad for what I consider "getting something done." That's simply my personal experience though.
The big disappointment of mobile is that all this stuff doesn't seem to result in enabling people to do their jobs better or more easily. Web apps really exploded with things like Basecamp, but the most mobile has brought along for that seems to be mobile email. (Edit to add, the only exceptions I can think of to this are actually the SMS apps deployed in the places pegged to explode in smartphone usage).
Having lots of people mindlessly addicted to notifications is not really that interesting.