The smart phone category is now firmly established, and there's little room for radical innovation. It's not a question of colonizing new niches—the market tre

The smart phone category is now firmly established, and there's little room for radical innovation. It's not a question of colonizing new niches—the market trend has been exactly the opposite, the iPhone cannibalized entire product categories by being good enough at so many things and then surpassing them with the integration benefits. Sure there is room for innovation and expansion into new niches, but those are small local maxima, nothing that is revolutionize phones again. If you realize what the smartphone means—literally the entire middle class population with a powerful networked computer in their pocket—and where it stands in the logical progress of computers from government to business to home to the person, it's clear that the next revolution of this magnitude will be nothing less than physical implants. Maybe there will be some intermediate step like Google Glass, but just like smart watches it's very hard to beat the utility of a phone in your pocket. Other major innovations will happen, sure, but they will come out of unexpected areas and solve new problems. The OA seems to be nostalgic for the pace of innovation of the last 8 years, but that time is over now, smartphones will continue to improve incrementally but the low-hanging fruit for reinventing them is pretty well harvested. Even if someone comes up with a fundamentally better mobile paradigm than iOS it's probably impossible to overcome the network and polish effects of a decade of Apple and Google pouring their entire essence into their respective mobile platforms.