Characterizing the Technological Evolution of Smartphones: Insights from Performance Benchmarks Qiwei Han Daegon Cho Department of Engineering and Public Policy College of Business Carnegie Mellon University KAIST Pittsburgh PA 15213 Seoul, Korea 02455 [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT by advanced computing capability and network connectiv- Recent technological advancements in smartphone have paved ity [25]. In essence, the accelerated convergence of mobile the way for the rapidly growing mobile commerce. As smart- telephony, personal computing and Internet services leads to phone vendors launch the products with a rich variety of the emergence of multi-sided technological and commercial technical features for different end-user market segments, platforms that involve interdependent stakeholders, includ- understanding the evolution of these features is of vital im- ing chipset makers and component suppliers, smartphone portance to all stakeholders in the smartphone industry. We vendors, mobile network operators (MNOs), mobile OS and address this issue by exploring technical specifications of application developers [7]. These stakeholders together con- smartphones at both the feature and the device level. In par- tribute complementary innovations and integrate both hard- ticular, we introduce the benchmarks to operationalize the ware and software artifacts into smartphones that provide overall performance of smartphone models, such that multi- users with \over-the-top" services, such as Internet brows- dimensional technical features can be quantitatively summa- ing, video streaming, online gaming, etc. [24]. Meanwhile, rized into a single index. Through the analysis of a compre- the smartphone industry has continuously witnessed that hensive dataset entailing technical features for smartphone new entrants such as Apple and Samsung outcompete the models launched during the years 2012-2015, we show that incumbents for their superior product development and de- although certain features have become the standard func- sign strategies [14, 31]. This phenomenon leads to both the tionality, the smartphone industry is largely innovative and proliferation of new phone models and high variations of continues to evolve over time. We believe our findings may technical features among heterogeneous manufacturers, im- provide important insights into the future development and plying that product differentiation still characterizes this in- design strategies of smartphones. novative and competitive market [8]. Therefore, smartphone vendors have strong incentives to build the products at the technological edge, because this may create more values in CCS Concepts response to the ever increasing performance demanded by •Information systems ! Data analytics; •Human- the market than merely imitating from competitors [27]. centered computing ! Smartphones; Characterizing the technological evolution of smartphones along a set of features is also of vital importance to other stakeholders in the wireless industry across the value chain. Keywords MNOs are challenged by the declining voice and SMS usage Smartphone; Mobile Technology; Performance and substantial investment in handling network capacity due to the surge in mobile data traffic. As smartphone users have higher willingness to add mobile broadband to tariff 1. INTRODUCTION plans as add-on services, MNOs endeavor to close the rev- Smartphones nowadays have quickly replaced feature phones enue gap by inducing subscribers to adopt more advanced to become the dominant configuration for mobile handsets. smartphone models and transform tariff structures to be- Gartner estimates that smartphones account for 82 percent come more data-centric [29]. Moreover, mobile application of mobile handset shipment by the end of 2016 [13]. The developers heavily rely on the technical features embedded popularity of smartphones reflects the fast technological evo- in smartphones as enablers of their services [25]. For ex- lution of mobile handsets from communication devices with ample, the market potential for location-based mobile ap- fixed functionalities to general-purpose devices empowered plications would be limited without a large installed base of smartphones equipped with GPS sensors. Lastly, improve- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or ment in smartphone features may increase consumer utility classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed and in turn spur widespread adoption [33]. For example, for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- the early success of Apple's iPhone can be attributed to the tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than enhanced web browser and touchscreen technology that pro- ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re- publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission vide its users with a compelling mobile Internet experience and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. and thus generate positive network effects [12, 37]. ICEC ’16 August 17–19, 2016, Suwon, Republic of Korea However, the increasingly sophisticated feature combina- c 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4222-3/16/08. $15.00 tions that smartphone vendors leverage to build the prod- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2971603.2971635 ucts for different end-user segments complicates our under- Nokia rapidly lost its market share to Apple and Android standings on how smartphone technologies evolve for the (e.g. Samsung). Moreover, the market share of top five following reasons. First, as smartphones typically contain a vendors dropped from 80% in 2008 to 47% in 2015, indi- rich variety of technical characteristics, the objective eval- cating that mobile handset market has become ever more uation of overall device performance is underexplored. For fragmented (Fig. 1b). Third, the market share by mo- example, tightly integrated technical specifications such as bile OS can further reflect the fundamental shift in market CPU frequency, memory size and power consumption are at dominance from Nokia's Symbian and RIM's Blackberry to play in partially affecting system performance of a smart- Android and iOS once developed around 2008 [31]. More phone. Second, comparative measurement of smartphone specifically, Android now represented over 80% of market models across different dimensions (e.g. mobile OS plat- share and together with iOS (16%) dominated the market, forms) remains elusive. Third, interactions between smart- leaving Microsoft's Windows Phone (2%) far behind even phone's hardware components and its built-in software fur- after its acquisition of Nokia (Fig. 1c). Fourth, the increas- ther plague the issue. A wide range of smartphone vendors ing availability of mobile applications (commonly known as that appropriate and customize the open standard Android apps) that users can download from app stores significantly platform may yield different usability even with similar hard- enriches the value of smartphone usage [17]. The annual ware configuration, due to the own proprietary design and mobile app downloads are predicted to exceed 220 billion in engineering process [31]. After all, the combinatorial nature 2016, of which nearly 14 billion is from paid apps (Fig. 1d). of smartphone related technologies cautions researchers to This fact presents exciting opportunities to understand the operationalize features beyond synergies between technical great potential of mobile commerce by exploring the behav- specifications [38]. ior of mobile app users [11, 21]. In this paper, we aim to characterize the recent techno- logical evolution of smartphones. We do so by exploring a 2.2 Development of Mobile Handset Features comprehensive dataset entailing technical specifications of The development of mobile technology features has been smartphone models launched during the years 2012-2015 at studied within the IS discipline since the feature phone era both the feature level and the device level. In particular, we [28]. Traditionally, new features are first introduced into introduce the benchmarks to operationalize the overall per- handset models and further upgraded to result in signifi- formance of smartphone models, such that multidimensional cant performance improvement. For example, the successive technical features can be quantitatively summarized into a generations of core mobile communication technologies (e.g. single index. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the from 2G to 3G, etc.) tend to be consistently more preferred first attempt that leverages the benchmark to measure the over the predecessors [23]. However, features are more often performance of smart devices such as smartphones. added to the handsets as the complementary functionalities We organize the rest of paper as follows. Section 2 pro- that rarely define generational changes in product evolu- vides the overview on the smartphone market and related tion [26]. Also, handset manufacturers strategically choose work on the development of technique features incorporated among a set of features to launch products for differentiation into the mobile device. Section 3 describes the background purposes [34]. Thus Koski and Kretschmer (2007) identify of smartphone benchmarks. Section 4 explains the collected two distinct strategies for the development of mobile hand- dataset of smartphone models with technical specification sets