Even on cruise control, mobile still blew past the PC

Maybe it’s the middle-aged blues: Mobile tech is now firmly entrenched, but not very exciting. This year has seen the passing of the torch from PCs to mobile devices, thanks somewhat to Microsoft’s big Windows 8 miscalculation but more to the fact that tablets and smartphones do much of what people want to do now. Tablets and smartphones are now owned by most American households, and signs of market saturation are visible. Who won’t have these devices in the next year?

Despite that momentous shift, it’s been a fairly uneventful year in terms of the technology. A parade of iPhone killers came and went, all selling less well than expected against Apple’s not-so-exciting-save-for-Siri iPhone 4S, which debuted in fall 2012. Although they got a lot of prerelease hype, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 disappointed due to uneven software, the HTC One due to its too-iPhone-like look and feel, and Motorola Mobility for its boring Moto X, whose X8 motion coprocessor is innovative but untapped. Yes, Google finally released a Nexus smartphone, the Nexus 5, that it could take pride in, but it didn’t advance the technology in any meaningful way, and it had a crummy camera to boot. Yawn.

Then came the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. The iPhone 5s pushed new ground in its A7 64-bit processor and Touch ID fingerprint reader, but the potential of the first is as yet unrealized, and the latter is convenient but no more than that. The iPhone 5c is a minor revision to the iPhone 4S in a new case. Both have sold very well, with the iPhone 5s topping the charts at all the U.S. carriers since its release — great for Apple and its investors, but a yawn for everyone else.

Android tablets were even more boring than Android smartphones, with no memorable models released, just obvious upgrades to previous models. And in the case of Amazon.com and Google, they basically replaced their crippled media tablets of 2012 with decent ones this year — necessary but hardly groundbreaking. The big news was the fact that Dell and Hewlett-Packard now have their own Android tablets, though they offer no more than other Android tablets. Zzzzzzz.

The iPad Mini boasted a Retina display whose extra pixels aren’t easy to detect, and the iPad Air became faster, thinner, and 25 percent lighter but didn’t get Touch ID. Both are selling quite well, so Apple clearly has figured it out it doesn’t need to shock and awe us, just keep improving what it already has. Again, it’s great for Apple and its investors, but a snooze for everyone else.

Mobile OSes followed the same trajectory. Apple gave iOS 7 a new look, inspired by Windows Phone and other youthful UI trends, but it basically works the same as before. Google changed Android even less, with several Jelly Bean updates and the KitKat update that essentially added more Google services in the search giant’s effort to capture all data possible about everyone on the planet. Incremental refinements — again. Yawn — again.

We didn’t see a lot of bad smartphones and tablets this year from Apple and the major Android vendors — that’s a good thing. But the incremental improvements are more reminiscent of the PC market, where every year they get faster and gain capacity, but quickly become hard to tell from their predecessors. Perhaps it’s fitting that tablets began outselling PCs in the year that the tablet market began to feel more like the PC market.

The real drama happened in the BlackBerry and Windows worlds, the mobile backwaters, but these dramas have been tragedies rather than triumphs.

After ignoring the shift in mobile usage for several years, BlackBerry finally released its modern smartphones, the Z10 and Q10, powered by BlackBerry OS 10. The devices are decent, but in no way are they iPhone or Android killers. Sadly, even diehard users of previous BlackBerrys didn’t upgrade to the new models, which shocked me given how they are better smartphones and retain the characteristics that make a BlackBerry a BlackBerry. At this point, BlackBerry is struggling to survive and now seems to be placing its hopes on its mobile management server, BES10.

Following years of languishing, Windows Phone saw a meaningful increase in sales, especially in Europe. But its user base tends toward those who treat smartphones like older cellphones: former BlackBerry and Nokia users who find Android and iOS too complex. That’s not a great foundation, though it’s better than nothing.

Windows tablets flamed out, repeatedly. Microsoft lost nearly $1 billion on its Surface tablets, then came out with a thinner version of one of those failed models. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and even Nokia gamely released Windows 8 tablets, which range from awful to adequate. The problem, of course, is that tablets don’t run traditional Windows Desktop apps well, and there are few compelling Metro apps in Windows 8. Windows 8.1 fixed a few obvious issues, but not the core problems. As the year ended, Microsoft began leaking news that it was going to rethink the failed Windows 8 approach. Let’s hope it actually does so before everyone has bought their iPad Air.

The one area that could have been exciting was the open source world, namely Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch OS. But open source’s committee approach meant that progress has been slow and accessibility limited to those able to root their phones from a Linux environment. And at the end of the day all you get is a basic OS that rivals the first iPhone and Android devices. Double yawn. The first Firefox smartphone is horrible to use, and Ubuntu Touch phones are still coming, though the beta is intriguing. Wake me up when they’re really here.

As someone well into middle age, I appreciate that my life is not full of drama. Dependability, stability, and consistency are good things. And I appreciate quality more than ever. I shouldn’t feel bad that tablets and smartphones seem to be hitting middle age, gaining those same qualities, at least in the Android and iOS worlds. But I miss some of the excitement of those early years, at least in theory. That’s why I miss the big shifts in mobile technology we saw in previous years, even if I understand we also saw a lot of half-baked offerings and failed experiments.

But despite my perioidic yearning for a shakeup, here’s to another year of incremental improvements, thoughtful engineering, and quality design in smartphones and tablets — just as if they were PCs.

This article, “Even on cruise control, mobile still blew past the PC,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.