Kazam talks the state of the smartphone race
With the industry’s biggest players having hit something of a specs war parity, British handset maker Kazam has suggested the space to differentiate with the smartphone space is all but got.
Claiming that the room for differentiation is getting ‘smaller and smaller’, the manufacturer has suggested that the leading smartphone players have moved to “innovation for innovation’s sake” – a move that is resulting in gimmicks more than experience-improving features.
“In the world of tech it’s all about innovation and typically product innovation. That’s great and all innovation is good as far as I’m concern. However, you get to a point this point of diminishing returns with regards to technology,” James Atkins, Kazam’s Chief Marketing Officer said speaking with TrustedReviews.
He added: “It’s going from 10-megapixel cameras to 11-megapixel to 12-, 13-, 14-megapixels. Is a 27-megapixel camera phone going to be common? When do we say enough is enough with that?
“It feels like as an industry, the smartphone is maturing and so this opportunity to differentiate through innovation is becoming smaller and smaller.”
According to Atkins, this trend is starting to have negative affect on the industry and, more importantly, the overall consumer experience provided by devices.
He stated: “In the opinion of Kazam, there is a danger that the industry is moving towards innovation for innovation’s sake.
“You are starting to get gimmicky, look what our phone does features. While it might be an impressive piece of innovation, realistically how usable is it? Realistically will you use it every day or is it one of those things that you might go ‘wow, that’s clever’ and then never use again?
“If it’s the latter, as a consumer you’ve paid for that somewhere. Someone has developed that technology, it has gone through testing, it’s gone through manufacturing. That is a significant investment that you will pay for as a consumer.”
These features have already started to become a nuisance, with the Samsung Galaxy S4’s eye-tracking capabilities and, arguably, Apple’s Siri, two such victims.
With these margins for differentiation growing smaller, Atkins has suggested that changes will start to move away from the hardware side of things, an approach already being adopted by Kazam.
“We are trying to move our opportunity to differentiate away from the phone itself, in to things like our policy that if you crack your screen we will replace it free of charge.”
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