The competition for market share for Smartphones continues to gather pace. We are now all too familiar with the Apple product releases in the second half of the year, the new iOS versions at the start of the year and we eagerly await the latest Android platform and news of the latest devices which support them.
But at what price does this come? When the iPhone was first launched, it was an innovation, it was new, it was exciting; now “innovation” is planned to highly staged product launches, which we know from project delivery in companies, when hard deadlines are set, there will always be a trade off of Quality, Cost and time or all three. When this happens the feeling of delivery is a momentary ‘high five’ until the realisation that the hard work starts and regular patches need to be created to protect reputation in the marketplace. This has certainly been highlighted in the smartphone market. For Apple products, we have seen large scale regressions in the functionality of new products and new iOS versions. Instant patches are delivered the next day after launch to fix a security flaw, or to fix a functional regression for apps. In the Android market the story is the same, we hear of product recalls of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 catching fire. So what is the cost of success?
Safety of consumers should always be paramount, with the higher capacity devices with ever faster processing units, there needs to be more rigour and standards applied to ensure the safety of consumers. The cost of propriety accessories and chargers is high; which has led to cheaper copies and ‘multi-point’ chargers flooding the market, what safeguards, regulation and standards are applied to this bootleg market?
We are now seeing some protection being applied, certainly from personal experience, the latest iOS prevents certain bootleg chargers from working. This is a short term frustration as I now have to purchase the real deal, but long term I will be thankful that it may have protected my device and my family.
In terms of functionality, the reliance of payments through devices; people’s entire life history is
Stored on their wrist, phone or tablet shared through cloud storage. The social responsibility on device manufacturers is huge; security needs to be paramount and ever changing to keep the hackers at bay as much as possible; but how stringent is testing in this area? The product launch has been hyped, and the crowds await, do the companies have the power to say no? Or do they launch and patch as quickly as possible, hoping that the impacts of the flaw is hard to uncover, and exposure would be minimal?
I am a massive fan of technology, the fact that I am sitting on a train to work connected to the World and being able to type this post is great; however, the need for quality products to protect lives and personal assets has to be the number one concern. I’d like to celebrate the innovations and new designs for what they are, not with the current tentative watching brief to see what the product is, and what flaws it has first.
Here’s to the product releases of the future that are safe and work first time…..We’ll at least I can dream!
