Are we any Smarter with Smartphones?

There are certainly a lot of us that are using them. Just knowing that the computing power in these devices is more than the computers used that put men on the moon, we should be doing things smarter, right? Let’s take a look:

• 8 million people in Canada own smartphones as of September 2011, representing 40 percent of the mobile market in Canada. This is up from 33% and a gain of 7 percentage points in the last 6 months, a very healthy growth spurt.
• Canada is still a BlackBerry nation with the largest share of smartphones in Canada, but Android is really growing significantly. RIM has 35.8% of the smartphone market followed by Apple at 30.1% and Google at 25.0%. Note though that in the U.S., RIM dropped to 9% market share from a 24% position a year ago (as Canada has long contract rates, we could see a shift off Blackberries when older contracts expire).
• The top usage – in total- for smartphones other than talking is- text messaging, downloading apps, accessing news and information and email. For business users, it’s still real-time talking, email and then content.
• Motorola Mobility recently highlighted that close to 40 per cent of Canadian company decision makers across all company sizes are considering Android smartphones for business use (this was in reference to their announced ATRIX 4G launch).
• The Big 3 operators are fairly even with smartphone market share with Rogers at 27% and Bell and TELUS tied at 25% each. It matters little which carrier to use, they all have them.
• Android is Bell’s fasting growing platform (9 different devices). For TELUS, 12 of their 24 current smartphones are powered by Android. Rogers currently has 14 smartphones.

So, with all these devices, are we any smarter? On the plus side, we’re doing more things when we’re mobile- email, texting and actually talking on the phone. But we’re still limited in doing business. When tablets, notably iPads, came into the market, there were some that said smartphones would be hit hard. The thought was that users wanted more screen size to do business and that smartphones were just too small. The size of the screen became THE main issue. There’s the 10 inch iPads and Galaxy Tabs vs. the smaller 7 inch Blackberry Playbook and Samsung Galaxy TAB 7. For Smartphone users, to be honest, it’s painful to work on Excel spreadsheets and to read long documents. So the bigger screen, whether 7 or 10 inch, was an indication that we needed the extra screen size to do business smarter. But smartphones are growing in unit volumes even with the onslaught of tablets.

In reality, we’re actually carrying two or three smart devices around because it depends on the application we need. You really need the laptop (PC or Mac) when it comes to office documents. It’s the same for making presentations- either a tablet or laptop when projecting presentations for clients. And even though the ‘smarts’ in computing power on the mobile phone is huge, it’s still limited in mobile functionality.

That’s where apps come in, like hereiam™, where we add value to the smartphone. For communicating, the ease and cost savings with hereiam™ leads the way in offering smarter tools for doing business when mobile. And expect to see a lot more in business mobile apps (hereiam™ and our competing friends) in adding value on whatever device you’re carrying. Bottom line- you need the app to allow you to work smarter, whether you’re using smartphones, tablets or the good old laptop computers for doing business when mobile.