There's a joke about the iPhone you've probably heard: It's the best smartphone there is, unless you want to make a call. Yeah? So what?
Having packed the mobile phone with functionality because it is the one thing people always carry, like a wallet or purse (and there are apps for that too), we've drawn ourselves closer to the moment when the ability to make and receive telephone calls may seem like a nice little feature on your pocket computer and communication device -- sort of like adding a camera was a decade ago.
Forget netbooks and tablets, which are ultimately niche products in the shadow of the most powerful tool nobody really saw coming: a handheld device that is infinitely scalable to all sorts of uses, and may be the one thing you absolutely cannot be without. The same invention that caused a revolution in voice communication is making voice calls irrelevant for many types of communication and information gathering. Technology has once again revealed what people really value, rather than what we infer they value -- and increasingly, what they value is their phones' ability to send and receive text.
As of December 2009, 35 percent of Americans had access to the mobile web, a 30 percent increase from the previous year, according to cellphone industry group CTIA. Smartphone penetration is still relatively low, but as these portable computers continue their inexorable march toward world domination, they could soon become the most popular hardware for accessing the web. Gartner Research predicts that smartphones (52 million units) will outsell not only netbooks and tablets in 2010, but also notebooks (30 million) -- and that by 2013, smartphones will become the most popular way to access the web in general, with 1.82 billion units, beating out 1.78 billion desktops and notebooks worldwide.
"There is no question that wireless data is becoming increasingly more popular from a subscriber standpoint and more important from a provider standpoint," said CTIA vice president of public affairs John Walls. "At the same time, the revenues generated by wireless data continue to make up a larger part of the providers' overall revenue picture … and this year the gains are more substantial than what we've seen in the recent past … a nearly 32 percent increase in revenue, which is a significant statement about how important data is to the industry."
Only about a third of us have access to the web on the go, but nearly everyone has access to some mix of SMS messaging, the web, Skype, Facebook and so on. Voice communication is still necessary -- it just has far more competition than ever before -- including from cellphones themselves.
"[The cellphone] is more multichannel, but voice isn't necessarily going by the wayside here," said Katrin Verclas, co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org. From what she's seen in the cellphone markets here and abroad, some cultures (African-Americans and Indians, for examples) tend to rely on voice communication more than others. "In the U.S., people are finding texting superconvenient and use that in lieu of a voice call, which requires the other party to be there. In the future, you'll see a drop in voice in the U.S. … SMS is now basic, every phone does it."
Neither AT&T or T-Mobile responded to our requests for the latest data about voice usage versus data usage in time for this article, although Verizon spokeswoman Robin Nicol confirmed that the company's data usage is on the rise and that voice usage has begun to dip. "Our customers are using more data, as evidenced by the growth in our data revenues and the continuing surge in text messages, quarter after quarter," said Nicol. "[Still,] our usage shows only a slight decline in voice minutes used."
Cellphone industry group CTIA saw text messaging double from June 2008 to June 2009, when Americans sent a staggering 135.2 billion text messages, and its data backs up the idea that voice is declining. The number of mobile subscribers in the United States increased 5.3 percent between June 2008 and June 2009, according to its report, but total talk time increased only 3.1 percent, representing a small per-subscriber decrease. In-Stat's calculations are more dire -- that voice calls have declined 15 percent in the past two years. Meanwhile, CTIA reported that the average length of a voice call decreased steadily from 3.13 minutes in June 2007, to 2.43 minutes in June 2008, and 2.03 minutes in June 2009. Apparently, more of us are spending our time on the phone trying to get off of the phone.
"The fundamental way we people communicate is just about to change again," said Delly Tamer, CEO of Letstalk, which sells a variety of cellphones. "We humans will now start to rely less on our mouths and more on our heads and our fingers."
Voice may be dying, but it's not dead. When you really need to talk to someone, there's always your phone's voice feature or (a VoIP app). Still, we're happy that speech-based communication has reached the tipping point, for a number of reasons:
- Voicemail is a slap in the face. It basically says, "I don't want to take the time out of my day to text you, so I'm going to take the time out of your day to make you dial in to a voicemail account and hear my words in real time." Google Voice's voice-to-text voicemail dictation solves this to a small extent, but it's an inelegant solution compared to pure text messaging.
- Text is more efficient in many cases. This one should be obvious, but clearly, text messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook, informational web searches, online customer service and other text-driven tools have replaced many of the phone's traditional uses because they let us accomplish the same tasks quicker, more cheaply, or both.
- Ringtone sales will finally decline. Ringtones, as annoying as they are needlessly expensive, are finally on the decline — from $881 million in 2007 to a predicted $750 million in 2010, according to IBIS World, which says the entire ringtone business will disappear by 2016. "Good riddance," some might say. We'd been wondering why people were willing to pay $10 per month for three ringtones when they wouldn't subscribe to an unlimited music service for half that price.
- In-flight calls are not an issue. The United States doesn't allow airplanes to run their own in-air cell stations, although plenty of domestic flights have Wi-Fi now that facilitate text-based (and VoIP) communication. In Europe, where planes can carry cell stations, OnAir logged only 10,000 voice calls between December 2007 and March 2009, despite having offered the service in 34 countries, and declined to give us more recent numbers, despite an earlier promise to log over 100,000 calls by the end of 2009. All of that hullabaloo about airplanes becoming flying chatterboxes was just a bunch of hot air.
- Landlines are for telemarketers. Those of us who still have landline telephone service notice that telemarketers have a harder time calling cellphones, a phenomenon which will only hasten the public's abandonment of landlines in favor of multichannel smartphones on which voice is one of many communication options. Only one in five Americans still rely exclusively on a landline -- a number that is almost sure to decline each year. Meanwhile, longtime landline provider AT&T recently asked the FCC to stop requiring it to offer the service at all. When even the big telcos say the landline business is doomed, the writing is truly on the wall (or, rather, on the smartphone).
See Also:
- 5 Ways the Cellphone Will Change How You Listen to Music
- Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive
- AT&T Wireless Offers 'Track Your Spouse' Feature
- Study Reveals How Much Cellphone Radiation You're Getting
- Nielsen: iPhone Is Top Cellphone of 2009 in U.S.
Photo: Flickr/Mike 'Dakinewavamon' Kline
*Homepage photo: maricopa.gov
*
