iPhone 5S: Time for an attitude adjustment

If the latest anonymously sourced reports are to be believed, Hon Hai’s Foxconn unit is about to start hiring Chinese workers to make the iPhone 5S widely expected to debut this summer. It’s an easy bet, given that Apple has begun production in the spring for a new iPhone released in the summer for nearly every year since the iPhone’s debut in 2007. The iPhone 4S and 5 were the two exceptions, with production starting three months later and the products shipping three months later.

So it’s no surprise that the iPhone 5S — or whatever Apple ends up calling it — is about to enter production. But that lack of surprise is not confined to the production schedule for the new iPhone: The rumormongering sites have struggled to come up with cool claims for what the new iPhone will offer. Since the iPhone 5’s debut in October, they’ve been stuck with the same tired “rumors” (meaning guesses and inventions) of faster speed, better camera, larger size and/or smaller size, new bezel, and … well, that’s really all they can theorize.

The lack of imagination on the populist media’s part isn’t occurring only for the iPhone. The less-frequent but constant rumors on new Samsung Galaxy models follow the same pattern, though given that Samsung has a dozen screen sizes available for its various Android devices, any screen-size “rumor” is bound to be true at some point. Likewise, the less frequent rumors for HTC’s Android plans or Nokia’s Lumia series of Windows Phones follow an identical script.

The question is that if the fanboy media have run out of ideas for the next generation of smartphone makers, does that suggest Apple, Samsung, Google, HTC, and so on are also past the era of meaningful innovation for their smartphones?

It’s possible. The last iPhone to truly break new ground in hardware was the iPhone 4. Other than the possible inclusion of the never-used near-field communication (NFC) technology, Android devices haven’t broken new hardware ground, though there’s been much experimentation on screen sizes and included ports. There’s been no real hardware innovation on the other mobile platforms for some time. Yes, a few years ago, Nokia experimented with a 41-megapixel PureView camera for its defunct Symbian devices, but it abandoned that technology quickly, as getting much past 8 megapixels ironically degrades picture quality at the size of a smartphone camera.

Instead, what we’ve seen is continuing hardware refinement: thinner and lighter bodies, better screens, faster processors, better graphics processing, better cameras, better microphones, and better speakers. They’re all welcome, but very evocative of the PC market, where for years there’s really been little to say about a new PC other than maybe how it looks.

That’s why the bigger action in smartphones in the last couple years has been in the software realm. Take Apple’s Siri voice assistant, the auto-stitching panoramic photography feature that debuted in Android and was copied in iOS, and the software in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S 4 that lets its infrared sensor be used for touchless gesture detection and for sending scan codes to traditional shopping checkout terminals.

My suspicion is just as the Galaxy S 4 hardware is little different from the Galaxy S III, the iPhone 5S hardware will be little different from the iPhone 5. If there’s to be a wow factor in the new iPhone, chances are it’ll be in iOS 7 and/or accompanying apps.

New software doesn’t mean we’ll get a wow factor, of course. The Galaxy S 4 had an amazingly hyped lead-up, but Samsung showed a fairly uncoordinated collection of apps that each had promise but didn’t revolutionize the smartphone — followed by an almost angry reaction by the same media that created the hubbub in the first place, a phenomenon we saw a year ago with the iPhone 5. The same media-hype-and-backlash cycle hit the mythical Facebook phone predicted by bloggers for years and that came sort-of true this month in the guise of the Facebook Home main screen on the forthcoming HTC One, a device that suffered from extreme prerelease hype, then unhappy reviews from fanboy reviewers who drank their own Kool-Aid.

The lunacy of the fanboy Web aside, the lesson is that after six years, it’s harder and harder for smartphone makers to find truly revolutionary new hardware capabilities to wow us. It’s easier to find new software capabilities that turn heads, but “easier” does not mean “easy,” either.

As smartphone technology matures, our expectations need to change. We need to expect less each year from our favorite device makers. Perhaps we’ll see a new spurt of deep innovation again after a regrouping period, but expecting it every year is unrealistic. At some point, expecting it at all is dubious. Just ask the PC makers.

The good news is that the pressure to upgrade your device will lessen. The carriers are already anticipating this shift to normalcy. Verizon Wireless last week extended the period after which you are eligible for a subsidized upgrade from 20 months to 24, and T-Mobile has jettisoned the subsidy notion, moving instead to an installment plan approach with — you guessed it — a 24-month payback period. The carriers have good financial reason to increase the gap between subsidies, but the switch to the installment model doesn’t have those advantages and better reflects carriers’ predictions as to how long people will keep a device before feeling compelled to upgrade.

Just as people hang onto PCs longer than ever, so too will they hang on to their smartphones as the wow factor for each new version declines.

This article, “iPhone 5S: Time for an attitude adjustment,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.