Smartphones: The Right Ingredients Are Here To Make Them A Success

Smartphones have become a permanent fixture in our daily life and offer near-universal access to information power, allowing each one of us to get literally and figuratively glued on to these interesting gadgets and devices all day long. Phones were created as social tools. And smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user’s needs, and all without the need for a Web-based social network. It is like a powerhouse of information in our hands. That is because a smartphone is possibly more capable than an average human being! Users are able to communicate with anybody in their address book, anywhere in the world, with almost any content mix and at any time. This has been compelling to users and has driven the growth of apps.

Smartphones get their appeal from the User Interface (UI) that resides on the device and developers bank on the best smartphone UI to bring life to their app ideas. Over the past few years, user interfaces on smartphones have undergone a sort of renaissance. What was once a stylus-driven experience, reminiscent of a desktop PC, has now become a finger-friendly endeavour that offers new design paradigms. A smartphone can be easy to use with a capacitive touchscreen.

The big players in this space are all working to provide the best user interface in their own way. Earlier, smartphones felt like using small, sluggish PCs and most methods of interaction relied on having a stylus. The UI elements were often small and tucked in the corners of the screen. A stylus is actually a very precise method of interaction, when paired with a resistive screen. One thing that these earlier smartphones understood is the idea of having easy access to information. The development and use of finger-friendly capacitive touch has enabled the use of interface elements like multi-touch. Moving ahead, user interface is now looking at a quantum leap – from multi-touch to being touch free – a scenario where mere gesturing would suffice.

Companies today are working on gesture-based UI technology and believe that gestures represent the next significant evolution in computing interfaces.

As technology captures human movements and gestures, it allows smartphones to do some pretty cool things these days. Smartphones are becoming more like, and in some cases even smarter than, human beings. Smartphones know everything about you. With the rise of Location-based Services (LBS), smartphones now have the ability to pinpoint your exact location. Based on your mobile searches, the phone can easily make recommendations, gather coupons and direct you to places of interest. Your smartphone will know who you are by recognising your facial features. And it will help you shop; QR codes and Near Field Communications (NFC) are ensuring that.

An increasing number of smartphones can now connect to the Cloud. Cloud computing is where the digital world is heading and being able to access all your files from your smartphone will make people more productive, more mobile and more efficient. Then there is augmented reality, a geographically tethered image superimposed on the canvas of reality, which is now being adapted for smartphones to overlay text on the view through its camera. These instruments can also help diagnose diseases, troubleshoot machinery and launch classrooms. The possibilities are simply endless.

With every advancement in technology, user interfaces are getting smarter and thus helping phones to become more human, to match our instincts, our moves and our needs.

About the author: Annie Mathew is director-alliance at BlackBerry India.
Image: ThinkStock