Recently I’ve made a very interesting observation in regards to my phone usage patterns. I actually rarely use it as a phone per se nowadays: probably 10% max.
For my phone, the majority of uses is probably something like:
1. 50% – listening to music and podcasts
2. 32.5% – reading & sending email and/or SMS
4. 10% – web browsing
3. 5% – actually talking on the phone/skype
4. 2.5% taking pictures
But what does it actually tell us?
I guess what we see here is a natural evolution path. An analogy would be cassette players. (I hope at least some of the readers still remember what it is 
) Initially they were quite bulky and couldn’t offer much functionality other than listening to the compact cassette per se. But time went by and pretty soon you could also get EQ, recording, reverse, the ability to connect an extra pair of headphones and so on. And that’s considering that you could get a small size device sized roughly as a cassette itself. Obviously, all those became obsolete, once the MP3s started taking over.
Do we see the same thing happening to the phones? Yes and no. Since a smartphone needs a decent size screen, instead of making the phone smaller, the main competition nowadays is around making it thinner (remember Motorola RAZR?)
We all remember PDAs as well – Palm was one of the biggest players on that scene. Time went by and what we currently have is a product of convergence. It can do everything that a cassette player, PDA, photo/video camera could do and then some. It would be logical to assume that the usage patterns change is inflicted by adding new functionality. Having said that, the interesting question is – what can we think of (in terms of functionality) will appear in the future smartphones, provided that we don’t have it today?
