News - Motorola boss says phones are much more important than tablets

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Sanjay Jha reveals some insights into the mobile device business.

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Read more.

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"I believe the device you carry with you at all times is much, much more important than a tablet, which most of us will carry about 30% of the time," said Jha. "And I absolutely believe that the phone is going to be the best computer, because it's with you at all times.

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Seems like an eminently sensible position - but, if this is the case, then why the heck is the fancy "laptop" docking station for the Atrix such an incredibly high price? Last time I looked it was actually cheaper to buy a basement-spec'd netbook. :(

Don\'t forget the question that that answer was in response to, though ....

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Does personal infotech over time end up focused almost entirely on the phone?

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Which begs the question .... how do you define "personal infotech", and more relevantly, how does Sanjay Jha define it?

If you\'re talking about the kind of things people do on the move, then clearly, the phone wins out hugely. But he also says

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It\'s going to be the best camera, because it\'s there when you need it. It will be the best music player because it\'s with you at all times.

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What is the "best" camera? The one you have with you is only one definition, and there are a lot of things you can with a "proper camera that are WAY beyond what a cellphone camera can do, ever has bee able to do and in the foreseeable future, ever will be able to do.

The same applies to music players. My home system isn\'t much use to me on a train, but when I\'m at home, is the "best" music system my cellphone or my fairly sophisticated stereo system? I can tell you which one I choose to use at home, and the cellphone is anywhere close to in the same league.

And as for other things, who is going to choose to watch a movie on a cellphone if they can use a tablet with a much larger screen, and who is going to use a 7" tablet if they have a Bluray player connected to a 50" screen? And if they\'re at home, they may well have both option.

Cellphones are very good at some things, most particularly, portability, and they give us other very useful functions if we don\'t have access to better-suited devices, but personally, I\'m not giving up a decent camera for a cellphone, nor a proper stereo for a cellphone, and I\'d bet good money I\'m never going to give up a decent TV screen for a cellphone.

Cellphones are extremely useful devices, highly capable in many regards and are a fantastic device when on the move. They are not, however, a substitute for many other types of device, and they are not a substitute for a tablet, either. And personally, hell will freeze over and demons will go ice-skating before I\'ll try to read a book on a cellphone, or watch a movie on one.

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Originally Posted by Saracen

Cellphones are very good at some things, most particularly, portability, and they give us other very useful functions if we don't have access to better-suited devices, but personally, I'm not giving up a decent camera for a cellphone, nor a proper stereo for a cellphone, and I'd bet good money I'm never going to give up a decent TV screen for a cellphone.

Cellphones are extremely useful devices, highly capable in many regards and are a fantastic device when on the move. They are not, however, a substitute for many other types of device, and they are not a substitute for a tablet, either. And personally, hell will freeze over and demons will go ice-skating before I'll try to read a book on a cellphone, or watch a movie on one.

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Hmm, may I suggest then, that you're perhaps the demographic that would appreciate Motorola's current "modular" approach, especially if extended to it's logical extent.

So, for your music player, you have some form of "dock" when the phone is merely providing the storage of MP3, ACC, FLAC, etc to be performed by some more elaborate hifi component. Likewise, the phone could be hooked up via HDMI to supply MP4's to be viewed on that large screen plasma.

Similarly, the tablet - downgrade it to a dumb touch screen that a phone docks into. There's already the Atrix's "laptop" dock.

What I'm getting at is that if someone puts their mind to it then there's a real possibility of "convergence". In fact, the only exception I can think of so far is digital cameras, unless someone's going to come up with some Heath Robinson arrangement where a phone provides the processing power, storage and display/control for a "proper" camera, complete with decent optics?

And no, I don't work for Motorola!

Yes - smartphones are the ultimate convergent device, and as is so often the case they don't do many functions as well as a specialised device. But they're a swiss army knife that everyone will always have with them and a lot of people consider that convenience sufficient compensation for the compromises they have to make.

I think that's the point Jha was trying to make and I would join Saracen in pointing and laughing at anyone who suggested phones would replace TVs.

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Originally Posted by crossy

Hmm, may I suggest then, that you're perhaps the demographic that would appreciate Motorola's current "modular" approach, especially if extended to it's logical extent.

So, for your music player, you have some form of "dock" when the phone is merely providing the storage of MP3, ACC, FLAC, etc to be performed by some more elaborate hifi component. Likewise, the phone could be hooked up via HDMI to supply MP4's to be viewed on that large screen plasma.

Similarly, the tablet - downgrade it to a dumb touch screen that a phone docks into. There's already the Atrix's "laptop" dock.

What I'm getting at is that if someone puts their mind to it then there's a real possibility of "convergence". In fact, the only exception I can think of so far is digital cameras, unless someone's going to come up with some Heath Robinson arrangement where a phone provides the processing power, storage and display/control for a "proper" camera, complete with decent optics?

And no, I don't work for Motorola!

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It's an approach, sure, but if you're going to start having all sorts of ancillary devices, then it's not so much the phone that's the solution, but the mix.

Right now, phones are dominant, but we could argue that that's because they've got a hell of a head-start over, say, tablets.

What's to say that in, say 20 years, the tablet won't be the central device and the phone relegated to a "mobile" add-on? It'll still do all the things it does now, and no doubt, some we haven't done yet. But does it make sense to have the phone as the central hub of "personal infotech", or does it make more sense to have it possessing only a limited sub-set of personal information, and perhaps, functions?

After all, any mobile device you carry around with you implies at least a couple of significant security risks, and the smaller it is, the bigger those risks. One such risk is losing it, another is simply leaving it laying about and losing data on it, and a third is getting mugged and having it taken from you. If it's a central point for personal infotech, that implies compromising data that needed be exposed to those risks, but it'd be smart to keep that to such stuff as is necessary to expose to such risks.

A sensible strategy might suggest that anything the phone has on it is because you need the phone to have it on it, and anything that doesn't need to be on it isn't kept on it, but on something else. Maybe that's the tablet, because as a much bigger device it's more likely to be less useful mobile, so more exposed to those risks. And yeah, sure, people carry them in briefcases and use them on a train, but how many people will take a 7" (let alone a 10") tablet down to the pub for a boozy night, much less to a party? And if they do, it meeds to be pointed out to such sad individuals that their chances of pulling are likely to increase significantly if they leave the damn thing at home. ;)

At least part of my reservation is that some of the things that make a mobile phone so useful are also the things that compromise it so much, and one of then is screen-size.

I said earlier I'm not interested in watching movies on a mobile phone, and I'm not. Personally, I will not do that. The screen is too small. If a movie is worth watching, I want it on a decent screen, and to be honest, I'm not interested in watching it on the average computer monitor, much less tablet and certainly not mobile phone. I want to be sat back in a comfortable chair, decent-sized screen, surround sound system on, and enjoy the full ambience. Otherwise, I'm not making the most of the movie. And if it's a movie that isn't worth watching, why bother watching it at all? I'll use my 90 minutes (or whatever) in other ways.

Maybe some people are happy to watch a movie on a phone. Not me. It's a waste of a good movie for me. I've been able to do that on portable devices I own for years, and never have, never will.

Similarly, SatNav. Yeah, you can get SatNav on phones, but I prefer a decent, dedicated unit, whether built-in to car (or car stereo), or a third-party device. Why? Mainly, screen size. I prefer a decent screen because I find it far easier to glimpse at a map schematic if it's on a large screen.

Cameras in phones? Well, they've come a long way, and can certainly give decent results in good light. But I've yet to see one that will give results up to a decent compact camera in low light, let alone an SLR. So as a keen photographer, the only benefit a camera in a phone has is for times when I don't have a proper camera with me. Useful? Yes. Essential? Nope.

My point? Convergence isn't necessarily either always a good thing, or desirable. A phone with a screen large enough to be optimal, for me at least, for several of this type of function is compromised in it's most essential feature, that being portability.

And we need to bear in mind that this whole area, this whole arena, is still, well, if not a child then no better than a teenager. Markets, applications and users mature over time. The fact that smart phones are so dominant, in their current form, right now, doesn't mean that that's what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years time. I'm old enough to remember when CDs first came out, and we thought that was the be-all and end-all, the ultimate. I remember replacing a car 8-track device with cassette tapes, and that was a revolution. I remember buying one of the first ever programmable calculators, and writing programs for it. This was many years before Apple released their first computer, much less i-anything. And home computers were, in those days, the realm of sci-fi movies and Tim Berners Lee was, like me, barely out of short trousers.

If there is a tendency to large levels of convergence (and my bet is that there will be), then it remains to be seen just how central the phone is. Maybe it'll be the very core, but it's too early to say. And regardless of what big companies say or think, the market has a habit of being .... unpredictable. ;) :D

Trig says Motorola boss is a tit.

Personally I think there will be a blending of the two, infact, just had an idea..

Seeing as phones are getting more powerful how about a phone that has some sort of wifi/bt link to a remote touch screen with its own battery, essentially a dumb tablet, would be a larger touch screen, a battery and the other end of the wifi/bt link, you would sync this with your phone and when you needed a larger screen you could just pick it up, switch it on and use it. It would have the advangate of having all your data on it already as it would be your actual phone, just with a bigger screen.
If you wanted a 7" screen, you could just buy one, 10", no problem..
If you wanted to get really flashy you could put a camera in it and use it for facetime or whatever the equivalent would be depending on OS..

Hows that for an idea Mr Motorola boss...

Agree with pretty much most of what you're saying Saracen. I don't use my smartphone for any of the music/video playing; photography; web browsing capability if I've got a "proper" device to hand. And I've certainly had a go at my kids for using their iOS devices for word processing when they've got proper keyboard/screen/mouse combo's available. It must be a worry in some circles that people will be content with their smartphone capabilities and not bother with proper devices to an extent.

The only exception is satnav - I don't have much use for one and I personally find the 4" smartphone display to be quite usable. I use the CoPilot software which at least has a display mode that gives just the basic info and loses the confusing map display until it's absolutely necessary. It was far easier to justify a £20 CoPilot app purchase than that for a TomTom. What gets me is that some folks are advocating using a tablet for this function - I remain very unconvinced of the safety of this!

I think I'm agreeing with what Mr Jha is saying - phone is more important than tablet, which still seems to be a niche device to me. The 7" I got recently spends most of it's time as an eBook reader (because I don't like eInk screens - the flash on refresh gives me migraine). What I was getting at was that the phone could be used more by making it the hub of various other gadgets, rather than trying to force people to put up with it's obvious shortcomings (small screens, poor audio reproduction, no optical zoom on cameras, etc).

Still got the first CD I bought - "Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits. Can even remember whapping it into a Sharp ghettoblaster I got with my wages from the local Comet store. Happy days...

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Originally Posted by [GSV]Trig

Seeing as phones are getting more powerful how about a phone that has some sort of wifi/bt link to a remote touch screen with its own battery, essentially a dumb tablet, would be a larger touch screen, a battery and the other end of the wifi/bt link, you would sync this with your phone and when you needed a larger screen you could just pick it up, switch it on and use it. It would have the advangate of having all your data on it already as it would be your actual phone, just with a bigger screen.

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Don't like the wireless bit - surely needless duplication of what's already in your smart phone. What about a dumb tablet like you're suggesting with a slot that you dock your phone into. So the phone then provides OS, apps, storage, network and your "dock" provides bigger screen and larger battery. Advantage of that way is surely that the tablet can be really stupid - so low cost - and you don't have to start draining your phone's battery to drive the tablet. Nor have to spend half your life pairing it...

Motorola did something similar with their Atrix laptop-like dock, but failed (as far as I'm concerned) by pricing it at, or above, the point for a standalone device. I can't see the point of paying nearly the cost of the phone for an accessory.

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Originally Posted by crossy

Agree with pretty much most of what you're saying Saracen. I don't use my smartphone for any of the music/video playing; photography; web browsing capability if I've got a "proper" device to hand. And I've certainly had a go at my kids for using their iOS devices for word processing when they've got proper keyboard/screen/mouse combo's available. It must be a worry in some circles that people will be content with their smartphone capabilities and not bother with proper devices to an extent.

The only exception is satnav - I don't have much use for one and I personally find the 4" smartphone display to be quite usable. I use the CoPilot software which at least has a display mode that gives just the basic info and loses the confusing map display until it's absolutely necessary. It was far easier to justify a £20 CoPilot app purchase than that for a TomTom. What gets me is that some folks are advocating using a tablet for this function - I remain very unconvinced of the safety of this!

I think I'm agreeing with what Mr Jha is saying - phone is more important than tablet, which still seems to be a niche device to me. The 7" I got recently spends most of it's time as an eBook reader (because I don't like eInk screens - the flash on refresh gives me migraine). What I was getting at was that the phone could be used more by making it the hub of various other gadgets, rather than trying to force people to put up with it's obvious shortcomings (small screens, poor audio reproduction, no optical zoom on cameras, etc).

Still got the first CD I bought - "Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits. Can even remember whapping it into a Sharp ghettoblaster I got with my wages from the local Comet store. Happy days...

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The phone is certainly more important than the tablet right now, Crossy. I'd certainly agree with that. It may well stay that way. But it goes back to ther context of the question which Jha was asked, which was about "personal infotech". A lot of what he may have meant by his answer depends on the definition of that term, which is why I said ... "Which begs the question .... how do you define "personal infotech", .... ".

Does that include homer servers? GPS? Photography? A domestic interface to everything from a home media system, to home automation, to domestic CCTV monitoring, to a videophone, to a recipe look-up system in the kitchen, to an e-reader, to .... well, you get my point, I'm sure.

As for e-readers, I don't find the update flash on e-ink any more of a problem (and, in fact, for me, less sdo) than turning a page in a book. I couldn't use a tablet as an e0reader for any period of timer, because the extra glare from backlighting, well, that gives me a headache. E-ink (or rather, Kindle) doesn't.

Similarly, GPS screens. I went for a large Garmin over the equivalent large TomTom, not for screen size (pretty much identical) but viewability. I tried both , and with low angle sun from behind, I couldn't clearly see the TT. No such problem with Garmin. This was with both, in operation, in the car at the same time. The difference was, to me at least, marked. But even so, a large screen on either built-in systems (a la Mercedes, etc) is still preferable in many ways to the screens on a smartphone or even the Garmin. Sometimes, size really does count. :D

I guess the moral of your preferences and mine is .... each to his own. :)

Well having had my Xoom for about 30 hours now, I can tell that they think the phone is more important than the tablet, thats why they put a decent screen on the Droid but on the Xoom its pretty crap tbh...