Chennai: Mobility is evolving at a pace of light. A couple of years ago mobiles with mono chrome displays were amazing, then it was all about color displays, and then the HDs, FHDs and Retina Displays. Now the trend of curved displays which can add a better viewing experience is catching up. The same can be said about the processors— the evolution from single-cores to dual to quad-core and now the octa-cores. Another verticals where the processors for mobile becoming powerful is a move from the 32 bit to 64 bit processing units where the chip handles 64 virtual memory addresses at any given time.
Another technology trend which is fast catching up is in the area of connected devices. The Smartphones, TVs, automobiles, health management accessories and others clubbed with cloud technology, be it in storage or analytics, are gearing up to offer seamless experience to the users.
All this and many more on the aspects of mobility and connected devices evolution were revealed in an exclusive interaction with Andrew Till, the Senior Vice President and Head of Mobile and Media Devices at Symphony Teleca. The company offers ideation, design, development, managed services and data analytics.
Challenges For Next Big Thing In Mobility And Connected Devices
1. Challenges in power management: As everything starts to communicate with everything else, this will place continual strain on the battery. Add to this the challenge of implementing analytics, and even though a lot can be done in the cloud, your device will be working overtime. It was interesting to see in the new iPhone 5s the implementation of a smaller M7 processor to take over these tasks in order to reduce battery life.
2. The radio bands challenges: There are challenges to the performance of the devices as more and more radios are integrated into them. We tend to forget that modern device has multiband radios for 4/3/2G, Wi-Fi, BT, NFC and others. Making all these radios perform at the optimum level will continue to present challenges to device vendors.
3. Challenges in software platform design: We have already seen some sizable re-writes of Mobile OS platforms to embrace social media and the same will be needed to true embrace analytics. Not only to collect all the data, but to be able to react to it in real time across the OS, from the UI presentation to scheduling key tasks and activities within the OS.
Foresight On Some Of The Future Devices
It’s always a challenge to say what will definitely happen in the future, but wearable technology will go mainstream. Combining with flexible displays will open up a whole new category of “unconsciously portable” devices that supplement today’s high volume mobile devices. We’ll be experimenting with a lot of form factors. This may be as simple as just providing additional displays to use, ranging to very specific devices that are focused on one or two key tasks. A good example of this is the emerging area of biometric sensors for monitoring your health and in particular sports performance. Another example is smart watches that help to bring new navigation experiences to users. Higher quality experiences at reasonable price range – with no trade-offs between power and performance, is what will make technology exciting.
Evolution Of Mobility And Connected Devices Ecosystem
There are number of key themes for the evolution of the connected device ecosystem. One will be the continued evolution of how everything works with everything else in a home. We have seen this really start to happen with Smart TVs and mobile devices, and this trend will spread to all things digital in the home, driving further digitalization within the home and office.
Another area will be - new applications and services opened up by the continued evolution of mobile broadband. In the same way that we saw the evolution of mobile social media with 3G, there are expectations on 4G and 4G+ to drive a whole new set of applications and services built around increased personalization, rich multimedia and location/context aware cloud-based platforms.
Another key development will be the integration of transport and automotive systems in this digitally connected world. We are already seeing the next generation of in-car entertainment platforms starting to embrace connected services, and this will flourish over the next 2-3 years as cars become fully connected.
The final and the most important technology lies in the use of analytics and the ability to increasingly personalize every aspect of user experience. We know that as bandwidth grows and personalization increases, consumers find the experience more enjoyable and rewarding- so this will really be an exciting area of development in the coming years. This development is a really exciting area as we have seen a massive explosion of social media usage on mobile devices in the past 2 years. The analytics will help refine every aspect of this experience- from how recommendations are shared with users to how you share updates and hot topics with others. Clearly there is so much information on social media sites that it will be hard to keep track of everything in real time, so analytics will play a critical role in ensuring that user experience stays relevant and that people don’t become overwhelmed by the volume of information they access.
BYOD’s Role In Innovation
Devices take on different personalities based on how you use them. From device manufacturing segment, the kind of interest we've seen is towards cross-platform integration and application development.
1. Security and ensuring that the data stored on the device is properly protected – differentiating dimensions for friends and colleagues.
2. Virtualization enabling users to have a work mode and a private mode. Clearly some of the developments highlighted above may not sit well with companies and hence this will become a key focus area moving forward.
In terms of the Internet of Things, this is clearly where we are heading and why analytics has such a bright future. We are quickly moving to a state where connectivity can be added to almost any device and devices can sense their environment.
Some Symphony Teleca Innovations: The company is working on expanding multimedia experiences, for example, which you will begin to see in consumer technology this year. Another area is multi-screen devices as it is working on the convergence of your phone with a TV, with automobiles among others. Symphony is also working on cross platform applications and content sharing; M2M frameworks with new level of intelligence.
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