Phones are the new cars

IT IS now the dominant technological item with which young people define themselves. What sort you have, how you handle it and how you customise it says a great deal about you. You may even have more than one: a commuter workhorse for use during the week, and a sportier model for the weekend. Your car? No, your mobile phone. The similarities between the two are striking—and informative.

Phones, like cars, are fashion items: people generally replace them long before they actually wear out. Both are social technologies that bring people together and act as symbols of independence for teenagers. And phones and cars alike promote freedom, mobility and new lifestyles, with unexpected social consequences. Both started off being defined by their precursors: early cars resembled horseless carriages, and early mobile phones looked similar to push-button fixed-line phones, only without the wire. Now both come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.

These similarities suggest that cars are a good place to look if you want to understand how mobile phones will develop in future. Cars have after all been around for more than a century, whereas mobile phones are at a much earlier point in their development. They are unquestionably the most personal, the most social and the most rapidly evolving technological devices on earth, and are likely to change as dramatically in the next decade as they have in the previous one (see article from the current Technology Quarterly). Look at what has happened to cars, and it is possible to make a few predictions.

Luxury comes as standard

The first, and most obvious, is that features that are found only on high-end phones today will be ubiquitous tomorrow. That is what has happened with cars. Luxury features such as a compact-disc player, electric windows, air conditioning and remote central-locking are now so widespread that it is difficult to buy a new car, at least in the developed world, without them. The same has started to happen with mobile phones: colour screens and cameras, once found in only the most expensive phones, are now difficult to avoid. That suggests that GPS satellite navigation, capacity for mobile television and storage space for hundreds of music tracks will also be standard features before long. Whether people will actually use these add-ons or not, however, is another matter.

Indeed, the second lesson from cars is that the direction of a technology's development depends as much on social factors as on technological ones. Who would have thought that diesel would ever be regarded as a green fuel, or that people would want to drive around suburbia in vehicles designed for off-road use in the wilderness? Mobile phones are also increasingly subject to fads (silver clamshells, ultra-thin black slivers) and occasionally something that sounds daft becomes popular. Nobody foresaw the rise of texting, for example. And the market for wireless earpieces depends on people's willingness to look as though they are talking to themselves. In contrast, although video-calling seemed an obvious use for high-speed mobile networks, it turned out that nobody wanted to use it. Predicting the future on the basis of technological progress alone, in other words, as the telecoms industry tends to, gives only part of the story.

Last, and perhaps most important, the history of the car suggests that the technology industry's current mania for “converged” devices is misguided. Nobody asks what the ideal shape for a car is, or predicts that eventually all cars will look identical. Instead there are different models for different uses: roomy people-carriers for school runs, sports cars for those suffering mid-life crises, small cars for urban dwellers. Some people own more than one car, since no single vehicle meets all their needs. The same will surely be true of phones: the quest for the perfect handset that does everything is silly, since different types of users have different requirements. That suggests that handsets will become more diverse, rather than more uniform, in future: divergence, not convergence. At the same time, expect to see more people switching between different phones depending on the situation. For clues to the future of the phone, look in your driveway.