[jpalomaki]

There's no room for revolution in smartphone space anymore. The market is too competitive and everybody is tracking it too closely. Revolution can take place in overlooked product categories (think tablets when iPad was introduced - I'd claim that was true revolution since it took significant time for the competitors to really catch up with Apple).

On one hand this is pretty sad. There's no wow factor, no truly exciting product releases. On the other hand the frequent releases mean that you can upgrade whenever and you always get pretty much latest available technology thanks to the yearly incremental updates vendors are releasing.

I'm getting suspicious if anything revolutionary can happen in the consumer electronics space. Companies are too eager to release early instead of keeping the stuff under wraps until it is amazing. Take wearable augmented reality devices as an example. We saw Google Glass years ago and then Microsoft Hololens. Now if somebody actually delivers a reasonably good mass market device in 2019 it hardly feels revolutionary after these prototypes. Same thing with VR headsets and smart watches.

[maxxxxx]

Have there ever been any truly revolutionary products on the market that came out of nowhere? Before the iPad there were quite a few attempts at tablets (e.g. Apple Newton) that tested out certain features and got market feedback. The main thing Apple did was to learn from other failures and create an appealing package.

I bet at some point someone will learn from all the attempts at wearable devices and develop something users actually will like. Or maybe we will decide that something like Google Glass simply doesn't work and move on to something else.

[rz2k]

The next revolution could be in software that is only possible with the power available in the iPhone X, that will be mainstream for other phones in a couple years.

I had an app called Vindigo on a Handspring Visor and later a Kyocera 6035 in the early 2000s that gave the location and mapped pretty much every restaurant, bar, and museum in New York long before maps were an obvious part of your phone.

I think the possibilities of AR are amazing, even though I don't think whatever the killer will be has been released yet.

[beamatronic]

I loved Vindigo! People forget how useful and powerful the Palm devices were. All they really needed was an always-on network connection.

[stcredzero]

There's no room for revolution in smartphone space anymore. The market is too competitive and everybody is tracking it too closely. Revolution can take place in overlooked product categories

What about in overlooked user interface technologies? I think FaceID would be great for unlocking the a MacBook laptop. Also, the face that Apple can now get ahold of those sensors for cheap and at scale probably opens up the opportunity for user interface innovation. People like to use touch for certain operations on current laptops with a touch screen, but some of those might be better done with a gesture away from the screen the doesn't cover up the view of the screen. (Or require the user to lift their hands up from the palm rest to avoid gorilla arm.)

Tablets existed before multitouch and the first iPad. It was a thinner form factor enabled by better battery and more frugal processors combined with multitouch which made the iPad what it is.

[untog]

> I think FaceID would be great for unlocking the a MacBook laptop.

This is in absolutely no way revolutionary. Not least because some Windows laptops have been able to do it for some time (HP? I forget who did it, but it was awful)

[prewett]

I'm not sure that "been able to do it for some time, but it is awful" counts as being able to do it. Imagine if your MacBook recognized faces correctly 100% of the time, and would automatically login to your account, your wife's account, or your kid's limited accounts depending on who it was that opened the lid. I don't know if that's revolutionary, but it sure would be easy to use.

[chokolad]

> I don't know if that's revolutionary, but it sure would be easy to use.

You can do this already for a few years now. Surface Pro 4, Surface book, Surface Laptop all have it. Works flawlessly.

[ASalazarMX]

I don't think so. The iPhone was revolutionary because suddenly you had a lot of sensors and the power to use them in creative ways. There are still sensors that could be added to devices of this price range that, coupled with new apps, would make them cool again: infrared vision, range finder, molecular scanner, etc.

Imagine pointing your camera to find an A/C leak inside the wall, or scanning fruit for their ripeness, or measuring furniture at the store to see if it fits in your house/door. Hell, it could even alert you if you have bad breath.

[Erwin]

The tomato thing has been done by SCIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_5Al294Nak

which apparently is now available as an extra sensor small enough to build into ordinary phones, with just one obscure Chinese manufacturer showing a prototype (at $299 for the handheld, it's probably too expensive for now).

[hbosch]

The yearly upgrade cycle has truly made cynics of us all. Those of us who will go from a iPhone 6 to an iPhone X will be amazed. Those of us who take every iteration every year will be annoyed.