One trend that I have been experiencing and noticing personally is that the usage of my smartphone for telephone purposes has reduced to almost nil. This is primarily due to 2 factors

The usage of video based apps for calling friends and family. Video apps are much more convenient especially with wi-fi as you can see and talk to the person on the other side When not using video, the usage of my landline for telephone purposes due to increasing call drop-outs in my smartphones. The call drop-outs have nothing to do with the phone but primarily because the telecom providers are facing severe infrastructure bottlenecks when it comes to augmenting the mobile capacity However I use my smartphone for many other purposes – from emails to social media to capturing memories to tracking tasks to collaborating with colleagues, etc. The smartphone has effectively replaced the over dependence on laptop. These days I do not take laptop to meetings unless I need to present something. I can take notes in my smartphone, mail them immediately to colleagues, can refer them at any other point of time and is also light on weight and size. However the phone, which is supposed to be the core of the smartphone, is rarely used. So is the phone in “smartphone” dying ?

Personally I believe that it would only be a matter of time when somebody decides to take the initiative and removes the phone calling feature from the smart phone. This does not mean that voice calls are dead. It just means that apps are much better at doing the same task, using the data stream rather than cellular communication. This would nevertheless be dependent on the telecom providers coming out with a successful business model from data streaming rather than call charges (think about the recent net neutrality debate in India) but this is not something that is impossible. However landlines might still continue to linger around for some more time until the network infrastructure is really capable of handling massive loads without loss of quality of service.

Another contributing factor to the death of phone in “smartphone” would be the wearable and things that would soon become an irritating reality all around us. Irritating because the things would claim to know all about you and much more than you personally know about yourself. Nevertheless this reality is round the corner and this has the power to change the way we interact and communicate. You could talk to your wall and the wall at the other end would beam your conversations to the receiver. You might not see or realize the presence of a phone but would be interacting over space similar to actual conversations. This again would be via specific protocols and vendor technology and not via cellular communication. Here again the limiting factor would be the network infrastructure.

The telephone, cellular telephone, may already be entering into the last stages. It is time to remove the phone from the smartphone and make it a true “smart-thing”