Monday April 5, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
Apple has been the superstar the last few years when it comes to rolling out truly innovative communications products but it looks like it has some competition after the unveiling of show-stopping superphones at the recently concluded CTIA gathering.
These new devices, coupled with improved operating systems and large 4-plus-inch screens, speedy processors, accelerometers, HD recording and playback, and high-speed video streaming capabilities, are likely to inflict healthy damage on the portable media and game player categories, as iPhone is already managing to do. In other words, these are likely the next game changers.
Android seems to be the superphone OS of choice. There are now more than a dozen Android models from all four national carriers, and developers seem to be having more fun writing for them thanks to the openness of the Android OS and the multitasking capabilities of the phones. But super BlackBerrys are sure to follow, as will phones running the new Windows Mobile 7 OS, which completely shakes up the icon/app-driven iPhone/Android user interface paradigm. The next superphone rollouts that took starring roles at CTIA, are coming from HTC and Samsung
This doesn't mean Jobs is sitting on his iPads. Stories already are circulating about the next version of the iPhone OS, 4.0, which will add multitasking capabilities. iPad runs on Apple's own 1 GHz A4 Arm processor, which likely will power the iPhone HD (as it's been dubbed) due sometime later this summer, with a more powerful 1.2 GHz chip juicing the imagined 4G iPhone Ultra.
The CTIA stars and future iterations of the iPhone are just the first wave of superphones, and there'll be more super capabilities to follow once Verizon inaugurates its own 4G service later this year, followed by even more superphones from AT&T when it launches its 4G network in 2011. Obviously, no phone booths are needed for this change.
The stars at CTIA were the Sprint HTC Evo the first 4G handset, running on Sprint's growing WiMAX network and Samsung's Android 2.1 Galaxy S 3G.
Just a few of the goodies with the superphones:
- 1 GHz processors
- The Evo is a mobile hotspot. Read that again: It's a cell phone and a mobile hotspot.
- The Evo can power up to eight additional 4G connections with peak download speeds of more than 10 Mbps, peak upload speeds of 1 Mbps, and average download speeds of 3-6 Mbps — all two or three times faster than 3G.
- The Evo has a front-facing camera/camcorder, presumably for face-to-face video chats with other Evo users.
- And, the Evo can quickly download HD video content, wirelessly stream HD video to an HDTV, and download streaming HD videos from YouTube.
- The Galaxy and Evo both can record video in HD, and have 16GB of internal memory.
