Will 'superphones' be the mobile trend of the year?

We’ve been hearing more and more about ‘superphones’. It’s such a new term that the Apple dictionary can’t quite cope with it and insists on correcting the term to ‘super phones’. But I’ve been hearing it around now and again for at least the last 6 months.

The background to ‘superphones’ is this:

You started off with your featureless feature phone, right? Next came the ‘smart’ phone because, well, it was a bit more powerful and it was basically a multimedia computer in your hand (the Nokia N95 was marketed with precisely that description). Come to think of it, ‘smart’ really meant ‘can do stuff in the background’.

Feature phones were limited to one task at a time. And when you wanted to — gasp — take a photo and have it upload in the background whilst you visited a website with the phone’s browser? That was an impossible ask on a feature phone. You needed a smartphone. Or, a smart Symbian phone, really.

[I was always tickled by the fact my N95 8GB knocked the socks off the first few generations of iPhone because, fundamentally, it could do stuff in the background — properly]

Android arrived giving us a new definition of smart. The device just asked for your Google username and password and — boom — everything on the phone was configured and ready, including your email, instant messenger and so on. Truly revolutionary, when it took decades to type your details into a Nokia, or when you had to wait for a ‘system administrator’ to sort out your BlackBerry email.

BlackBerry, by the way, was one of the original smartphones. Ever since I can remember, they’ve been multitasking with the best of them. It was fitting, then that I first saw the term ‘superphone’ at a RIM conference. They were talking about their uber-uber next generation devices running BBX or BB 10 as it’s now known. [I’m disappointed we’re going to have to wait some time — at least 6 months — to see one in the flesh.]

The term superphone is about to appear all over the shop.

If only it actually meant something more than a bigger CPU and slightly more megapixels. I worry that we’re going to have to wait for Apple to knock out their next iteration before the industry can do any serious innovation/copy.

A superphone should — in my mind — be able to wash the dishes. Almost literally. You know, it should be able to integrate with the house, the car, the shopping centre, the cinema multiplex, the train, the hotel room, the airline and so on. It should have all sorts of wickedly cool presence management along with something like Siri on-board speaking to you and understanding everything you want. It should be a phenomenal communications device.

Taking a standard 500 dollar Android device and giving it a 12 megapixel camera, a quad-CPU and a paint job and calling it a superphone… no. No, absolutely not.

You just know that this is about to happen though.

It’s a bit like various nameless networks renaming their H+ cell services ‘4G’ when they’re patently nowhere near the speed supposedly understood by the term.

I’ve heard whispers of Nokia and Microsoft being associated with the superphone term. Please, gents, please don’t knock out the Lumia X with a few more megapixels and call it ‘super’. Let’s see some serious innovation before the term ‘superphone’ is grabbed by the marketing bods and placed into the Oxford Dictionary?

I’ve had my say.

Now, bring on the slightly-slightly-better–than-a-smartphone superphones!