Dumbphones survive smartphone rise
Offline AI revolution awaits ‘superphones’
BARCELONA: Dumbphones - handsets that just make calls and send texts - were set to disappear as technology moved on, but they have survived in emerging markets and among nostalgics of simpler devices in the West. Their continued appeal was underscored on Sunday in Barcelona on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest mobile expo, as Nokia unveiled a revamped version of its iconic 3310 model, more than a decade after it was phased out.
Dumbphones remain useful to telecoms operators to “relaunch or accelerate” mobile phone use as they are relatively inexpensive, said Julien Miniconi, a telecoms expert at consulting firm Wavestone. “It makes sense especially in countries where the network is not great,” he added. Last year 1.5 billion smartphones were sold around the world, according to research firm Gartner. But the dumbphone market is still significant, with nearly 400 million sold in 2016. In certain emerging markets such as India, their sales still outstrip smartphones. Basic phones accounted for over 55 percent of all mobiles sold the third quarter of 2016 in the world’s second most populous country, according to the International Data Corporation, a market research firm. And dumbphone sales are continuing to rise in this major market by about four percent per year.
Even in developed nations where the telecoms market is mature, the phones continue to sell. “Today they are niche markets, either for those looking for vintage or for those who are anti mobile Internet or old people,” said Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Forrester, a research group. Young kids also use them as a first phone. Some people use them as secondary phone to lend to visiting friends and family from another country and avoid roaming charges.
British actor Eddie Redmayne, who won an Oscar in 2015 for his role as scientist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything”, made headlines as he became the latest in a growing band of smartphone refuseniks. “It was a reaction against being glued permanently to my iPhone during waking hours. The deluge of emails was constant and I found myself trying to keep up in real time, at the expense of living in the moment,” the 35-year-old said of his decision to go back to a less sophisticated phone.
Within any age group, it’s not hard to find people who refuse to join the smartphone revolution. “I have no interest in a smartphone - it’s expensive, fragile and I don’t see the use for it,” said Sandrine, 39, a Paris-based illustrator. “There is also the whole commercial aspect as well, with the need to update phones all the time, without mentioning the opacity of work conditions in China” where many smartphones are made, she added.
Germany’s Deutsche Telekom includes several basic phones in its catalogue to meet the needs of clients “who just want to be reachable”, said a spokeswoman for the operator. Nokia’s original 3310 sold nearly 120 million units worldwide, making it one of the world’s best-selling mobiles, but it is unlikely the revamped version unveiled Sunday, which includes Internet access, will post similar sales.
HMD Global, the Finnish start-up which bought the rights to the Nokia brand last year and is making the phones, is seeking publicity for the three other smartphones which it unveiled alongside the new 3310, said Forrester analyst Thomas Husson. “It is a way to create a halo effect around the other models by reviving talk about the Nokia brand,” he said. Ian Fogg, head of mobile at research firm IHS, said that HMD, as a start-up, “needs to leverage the warm memories (of the 3310) and show that they are innovating too. They don’t want to be seen as a heritage brand.”
Meanwhile, the smartphone revolution is poised to go onto the next level - with “superphones” equipped with artificial intelligence now on the horizon. By learning their owners’ habits, these new phones will be able to carry out tasks even when they’re offline. During a first phase only high-end smartphones will use the technology, like the new models unveiled by China’s Huawei at the Mobile World Congress.
But the technology is quickly gaining ground. More than 300 million smartphones - or roughly a fifth of units sold worldwide - will have the function in 2017, according to Deloitte. “It is one of the key areas we are investing in. After the smartphone, we will have the ‘superphone’ thanks to artificial intelligence,” said Vincent Vantilcke, marketing director for Huawei in France.
South Korea’s LG and Finland’s Nokia both announced in Barcelona that they would use Google’s voice assistant which uses artificial intelligence to answer users’ questions in their newest handsets. “Every big company in the sector is investing all their research and development on this,” Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann said. Today most smartphones run their applications by consulting data stored in external servers, known as the cloud.
But the arrival of faster processors will allow smartphones to use data already stored on the device - much like a human brain does to translate words or recognize images. “You teach a computer to analyse specific data, make sense of this data and act on it,” Zimmermann said. In the future “smartphones will almost make a decision before you do. When you go somewhere, it knows where you want to go” based on your usual habits, said Dexter Thillien, an analyst at BMI Research.
California-based start-up Neura has developed a system of artificial intelligence that can decode a smartphone user’s daily patterns of behavior. To do this it combines data gathered by the handset’s GPS tracker, the speed at at which the phone owner is walking and other elements with algorithms. It then generates insights about users’ past and present actions and predictions about what they will do next. Neura says its technology can be used to enable smarter healthcare, cars, music services and homes by constantly updating their portraits of user behaviour patterns.
With the new technology, a smartphone will be able to know whether its owner is “running to catch a bus or because he is jogging”, said Neura head Gilad Mieri. The phone can then wait for the right moment to send its user a notification - for example a reminder to take medication. Machine-learning enhanced phones will focus mainly on voice recognition, translation and image recognition, said Ariane Bucaille, a tech specialist at Deloitte. This will enable a smartphone to give a user directions without an internet connection, she said. Smartphones with artificial intelligence “will play an even more crucial role in people’s lives. It is another revolution”, Bucaille said.
At the moment, the new technology is still being developed. “Where the profit comes from, that’s still a big question,” Gartner’s Zimmerman said. Further down the line, tech firms plan to use AI in other products, such as driverless cars, Thillien said. However, privacy concerns may throw up a roadblock to the technology. A new European Union data protection law which comes into effect in 2018 contains “very restrictive” rules to prevent algorithms from making decisions on their own, Thillien said.
But Bucaille argues that smartphones with AI are actually safer because they do not store information on external servers. This may ultimately act as a disincentive for tech firms to develop AI for smartphones, as their business models so often rely on gathering and using data from users, said Mouloud Dey, director of innovation at SAS in Paris. — AFP