Of Quad Core Smartphones and Mobile Convergence

All smartphone manufacturers are pumping more compute power in their devices. Today, you can easily find smartphones with quad core processors for less than Rs. 15,000.

But, what do you do with all that compute power? Do you really need a quad core CPU in a smartphone? Surely you don't need it for basic things like email, browsing, WhatsApp, Angry Birds, FB, Twitter, photos, etc! My old iPhone 3GS lets me do all that without a hitch.

But you will end up consuming all that compute power, probably sooner than later, given the way things are moving. That's because everything seems to be converging into a smartphone these days. Take home automation for instance. Today, setting up sensor based home appliances is all the rage. Vendors have created smartphone apps that let you control all your household appliances remotely, be it heating, lighting, surveillance, air conditioning, or anything else that's controllable via an electrical switch.

Healthcare and personal fitness industries are also frantically creating smartphone apps that control all their products. A company in the US, iHealth Labs, has created the iHealth MyVitals mobile app for iOS. The company's various health monitoring devices can send (wirelessly or through cable) all their data like blood pressure, weight, blood oxygen saturation, pulse rate, etc to this mobile app. The owner can therefore not only have all his/her vital health statistics in one place, but can analyze them over time, set health targets and follow them, etc.

The app would provide graphical representations of various health statistics, like weight measured over a period of time. Likewise, the smartphone based health monitoring technologies are being introduced by other vendors as well. The healthcare device manufacturers save costs in building proprietary displays on their devices. Having apps gives them greater flexibility in adding more functionality and making their devices more useful.

Take Nike's latest FuelBand for instance-a smart and lightweight pedometer, which comes with an iOS app. FuelBand measure the calories you burn throughout the day and sends it to this app. So if you've set yourself a target, you can track how far away you are from it. You can also look up your most active days, and the days you were slow, etc.Moving forward, we're likely to see a lot of wearable computing products enter the market, which would push data to smartphones, use their Internet connection, etc. Take Google Glass for instance. It can tether with a smartphone over Bluetooth and use its 3G or 4G connection.

Besides these, smartphones are also becoming a vital medium for ecommerce companies to extend their reach, and we've talked about this in our cover story on e-commerce this time. Then, there is the regular slew of apps that are becoming more feature rich by the day, adding multimedia functionality. With mobile convergence happening in a big way, smartphones do need to become more powerful so that they can handle this load.