Apple, Android or Windows: smartphones have become boring

Don't laugh, kids. These were once considered state-of-the-art in mobile

So, BlackBerry 10 is as dead as a can of Spam, Windows Phone is rapidly following it into the dustbin of tech history, and the only real choice in mobile today is between Google's Android and Apple's iOS (which is also, notably, losing market share). And, let's face it, nothing is likely to come of Canonical's belated Ubuntu phone initiative. But does anybody really care anymore?

In the early days of a new technology it seems like there's something exciting coming out every week. There are worthy debates to be had about technological directions, microprocessors, user interface choices, development languages, everything.

But then, over time, the market sorts out the men/women from the boys/girls (delete as applicable), standards are decided and almost everything begins to look the same.

PCs turn into boring beige boxes all running pretty much the same operating system, smartphones turn into black or white rectangles, again most of them running the same operating system. The radical design of the BlackBerry Passport seems to have been roundly rejected by the market.

That's not to say that the world of smartphones has become entirely moribund. Apple's 64-bit ARM-based microprocessor developments, for example, could lead to genuinely converged platforms, or maybe Microsoft will get there first. But these are somewhat peripheral to the smartphone itself.

Sure, whenever we write about smartphones there are always plenty of fanboys who come out of the woodwork to support their favourite operating system or company, including, quite remarkably, BlackBerry fans. Yes, they're still around. This is an attitude I find mystifying - we're talking about profit-making companies and what are ultimately inanimate tools - but to each their own.

Yet the operating system battles that pitted Symbian and its various derivatives, Apple, Android, FirefoxOS, PalmOS, WebOS, Windows Mobile/Phone and Tizen against each other are as good as over. Quite simply, smartphones have largely ceased to be interesting. What more of consequence is there to say or to obsess over?

Smartphone hardware platforms are all pretty similar, the form factors of the devices are all more or less the same and they all do much the same in pretty much the same way. All the great artists have wisely copied the best from each other.

Sure, if you want the best camera a Microsoft Lumia 950 is terrific, and BlackBerrys remain top-class for email with the Messaging Hub. But whatever feature you want, pretty much any smartphone will do it competently with only the most trivial of operating system twists depending on how much you want to spend. So what's there to get excited about?

All that's left for the fanboys to squabble over is the vanity of petty differences, which perhaps explains why some of them can be so vociferous (or 'passionate', if you prefer). But arguing the toss over smartphones will soon be as big a waste of time as arguing in favour of DR-DOS over MS-DOS. 

The tech wagon is already moving on. Indeed soon, perhaps, the fanboys will argue about cloud providers and machine learning, if they can get their heads around it, and debate the various merits of one brand of robots compared with another. 

Source: Apple, Android or Windows: smartphones have become boring