Religious fervour surrounds the latest phone technology, despite it only representing a small slice of the world market, writes John Naughton.
I've just discovered that the ancient Egyptians worshipped a beetle - a scarab. Quaint, isn't it? I mean to say, we've come on such a lot since those primitive times.
But what's this? A note from my colleague, Charlie Brooker, about something he calls the Jabscreen. "Several times over the last year," he writes, "I've attended meetings that started with everyone present gently placing their Jabscreen face-down on the table, as though commencing a futuristic game of poker. It wasn't rehearsed, wasn't planned, it just happened; a spontaneous modern ceremony."
Charlie was struck by "the sight of a roomful of media types perched reverentially around their shiny twit machines ... each time it happened, a vague discomfort would hang in the air until, in a desperate bid to break the tension, someone would mumble a sardonic comment about the sinister ubiquity of the Jabscreen, likening it to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
This would prompt a 25-minute chat about apps and gizmos and which level of Angry Birds you're stuck on.
Sometimes there wasn't much time for the meeting after that. But never mind. You could all schedule a follow-up on your Jabscreens."
The Jabscreen, you will have guessed, is the Apple iPhone, an object currently regarded with Egyptian-grade reverence by the chattering classes.
But, in fact, the obsession with so-called "smartphones" extends way beyond Apple's device. Whole swathes of geekdom are devoted to various embodiments of Google's Android phone. Legions of men in suits - up to and including the US president - swear by their BlackBerrys. There are people who believe that their Sony-Ericsson scarab not only spreads sweetness and light, but can also cure chilblains. There are even people who worship devices running Windows Mobile. And so it goes.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media are anxious to service these obsessions, and so every launch of a sacred object is lavishly reported.
Last week, for example, RIM - the company that makes the BlackBerry - unveiled its latest assault on the smartphone market. It's called the Torch and it has a shiny glass screen just like the iPhone. But - lo! - it has something else: a slide-out keyboard! Wow!
All of which makes you want to scream that it's only a bloody gadget. But by then you have moved on to the business pages, which are regularly gobsmacked by the sales figures for electronic scarabs.
It seems that Apple is selling 4 million of the things every month, and is having trouble keeping up with demand.
But Android sales - at 4.8 million a month - have now overtaken them. Is this a sign Android will win out? Or will Apple pull some clever marketing stunt - like releasing a cut-down nano iPhone for the Christmas market, just as it did with the iPod? Will the BlackBerry Torch make a late run?
And where the hell is Nokia?
Are we perhaps losing our sense of proportion? The smartphone market is interesting, but just a small segment of the overall market. In 2009, for example, something like 175 million smartphones were sold. The top end of industry predictions of sales over the next few years is about 500 million devices. But the world currently buys about 1.3 billion phones a year, the vast majority of which are "dumbphones" - simple handsets that can't access the internet and which are much cheaper to own and run.
Now, over time, Moore's Law - which says computing power doubles every 18 months - will ensure that these dumbphones become smarter.
What this means is that the way the market will evolve is not by Apple & co selling more sophisticated, pricey, expensive-to-run smartphones to increasingly downmarket sectors, but by cheap phones gradually becoming more capable as they start to run more sophisticated operating systems.
All of which means that the factor that will determine the evolution of the phone market is not the features of specific devices, but the operating system that they run.
At the moment there are about 10 different mobile operating systems, which is patently unsustainable. My guess is that we will eventually get down to two or three. Apple's iOS and Android look like certainties. The question is what comes third - BlackBerry, Nokia's MeeGo or Microsoft's Windows Mobile?
No matter what happens, let's remember that these things are just gadgets.
After all, even the Egyptians' holy scarab was only a dung beetle.
- OBSERVER
