Phones — is it End of ‘super size’ me and beginning of miniaturization (a.k.a watches) ?

When iPhone X was announced with beautiful edge to edge screen and all the powerful specs (screen resolution to CPU), my first thoughts were multi-fold — from ‘i want that’, to ‘how much apple margins are’ to ‘how beautiful it is’, to ‘ whats next ?’ — for sure, its going to make it into lot of shopping lists. Did you notice that the screen size increased but overall size of the phone reduced ?

What else would be added to phones ? more specs ? flexible screen ? more powerful camera ? Except for respective fanboys most of the world is not that much interested in these incremental upgrades unless there is a compelling feature on it. Its like 2007 and what happened to laptops, still people buy it and upgrade it, but not at a pace how that industry grew for its previous decade.

In the same announcement, apple had this new 1.5 inch phone ? did anybody notice it? Yes, it was announced this year (2017) — you know what i mean. Yeah, law of technology and market says things would miniaturize

Previously i was a strong believer who believed that there is only a limited market for watches. Main reason behind it was carrying two devices at any time was a no-no for many average users.

Fast forward to today, i think the market is switching gears to a wireless watch phone in coming decade, why ? things that were flashing through my mind …

1. Its small and easy to carry around (one device to rule all) — can make phone calls and will be strapped to hand and drop protected ;) — no case required
2. Soon, screen specs would range from 1.5–2.5 inches (edge to edge display) — remember the first iPhone had just 3.5 inches with much less screen resolution
3. Its an improvement over current phone (it has more sensors that are health centric) — this could be one of the center pieces for adoption
4. Evolution and usage of emojis — from PC, size of communication have dropped mostly to 140 characters in phone universe — now the size of communication would be just 4 emoji’s
5. Voice to text getting mainstream — Alexa is a good example and customers love it (Hey amazon, if you happen to read this, here is your chance to do a watch and go after apple)
6. wireless ear pieces — very key part of the puzzle, now that one can have wireless ear pods, the watch only mode make more seamless for adoption (btw, ear pods can help innovate a whole industry of fashion pieces and one more add-on, bring back the coat pins — those would be the receivers)
7. Every new generation need a new set of technology and toy that previous generations will have tough times to learn — yeah that new generation have come now.

I can go on and on on why we are at cross roads in moving to next mini. Would love to hear your comments on why or why not this would be the case.

Chao