There’s little space to innovate in today’s conveyor belt of identikit smartphones. The usual cycle of a new smartphone usually goes along the lines of this: rumour, ‘leaked’ photos in San Francisco Bar, teaser video, cheesy launch event hosted by failed TV actor and, finally, a reveal of another 5.5-inch black slab of internet.
The phone is then quickly forgotten about, or dislodged from the news agenda by another Mark Zuckerberg acquisition, and dumped into a Morrison’s bargain bin alongside a Jean Claude Van Damme trilogy of movies that have no relation to each other.
The innovation that comes out of the bigger manufacturers is often laboured, cynical and gimmicky. Huawei made some highly questionable and desperately out of touch comments about ‘making women look ten years younger’ with their face auto enhancer software. HTC HTC tried to sell us a phone based purely on its ability to take a decent selfie. Apple Apple makes white phones. And Samsung gaffer taped a heart rate monitor to the back of the Galaxy S5.
So where are we supposed to turn if we want something fresh, something innovative? Startups. The little guys with the big ideas to reinvent the little black box. And it turns out that these ideas are starting to become a very real and disruptive threat to the industry leaders. Some startups, like Kazam, have taken a common sense approach to not only standout, but to also to offer simple yet unheard-of services to their customers.
Kazam co-founder James Atkins told me why his company had to do things differently: “Companies are starting to innovate in niche areas, and dare I say we’re seeing a lot of gimmicky ideas. I’m not knocking the innovation, I just question the value of the gimmick to the consumer. Like when voice dialing came out, you used it solidly for a day and never used it again.
“To be different, we’re innovating in the experience, rather than just saying’ ‘our phone is a millimeter thinner or our processor is slightly faster’. One of our most popular features is that we offer free screen protection and free screen replacement. So if you smash your screen within the first six months, we’ll replace it free of charge. Typically, replacing your screen would cost a hundred quid, which is a chunk of cash that not everyone can afford. So we’re innovating there.
“There’s also Kazam rescue, where we remote into your phone when you call our contact centre and fix any issues. It means that in about 70% of cases we can fix problems without having to return the phone and send it back to factory”.
Atkins explained how Kazam has a localised approach to both design and marketing: “We also have a local rather than global approach to selling our phones, so we can adapt to local needs better. For example in France they pay memory tax, the more built-in memory on your phone, the higher the tax. So the French always want low-internal memory but with an SD card slot. Nordic countries, however, want the biggest memory you could possibly squeeze into a smartphone. We’ve built different phones for different markets”.
Finnish smartphone manufacturer Jolla is another company that’s crowbarring its unique products into the industry. Co-founder Marc Dillon explained to me what Jolla has to do to stand-out: “For a start, we don’t sell people’s data and we think privacy is important. The whole world is talking about how to use your data and be able to make more money from lots of different kinds of companies. We said more than a year ago that it’s not in our business interests”.
He then explained how Jolla is better equipped to innovate than its larger rivals: “We all have more ideas than we can implement, but the agility with which we can actually make change with a company of our size is a strategic advantage. We are able to try different things and we can move on some of these things very quickly.
“I think there’s about five years worth of life in the handset / tablet form factor. What’s important to us is that our operating system, Sailfish is based on Meego, which is based on a principle of being highly scalable. Not only for displays and processors but also functionality-wise. So if you look at our user interface you can easily imagine that each of these application covers would fit perfectly on a smartwatch. There’s a scalability.”
Decentralisation and creativity is a constant and defining characteristic of the web. It makes sense that the same ethos should apply to the most popular way to access it. We’re seeing generation defining innovation coming from designers and developers whose only mantra is to solve and disrupt. Both the Phoneblocks (now adopted by Google Google) and Ubuntu Edge concepts are perfect examples of doing something completely differently and generating a lot of interest in the process.
Even in the more traditional battlegrounds like price, the ever-dropping cost of smartphone materials has brought in new challengers who have no interest in playing by the rules. The new smartphone OnePlus One, a combination of efforts from Oppo and popular Android Rom CyanogenMod, is a high-end phone that is comparable to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2 – but for half the price. And it’s brazen marketing tagline, “the 2014 flagship killer” suggests that the phone is a loud proud disruptor.
It’s this bold and daring approach from startups that is making the smartphone industry exciting again. If you combine the reality that smaller companies are forced to do something different, with the freedom to innovate that is so often shackled in big corporations, you get some interesting results. So long as there are hardware startups, there’s hope for smartphones.
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