Convergence myth: Why life with Galaxy SIII won't be easier

Would you pay Rs 43,180 for a phone-cum-camera-cum-mini-tablet-cum-musicbox-cum-whatever? As opposed to that, a good enough phone costs just Rs 2,000, a comparable camera Rs 4,000-5,000, and a regular Tablet PC less than Rs 25,000. In short, for around Rs 30k, you can get something better in three separate devices than what you get combined in the Samsung Galaxy SIII, which has priced itself just beyond the middle class market. To be sure, the price is not going to stop anyone who can afford it from buying it considering that the iPhone 4S costs even more. Reason: trying to buy that one device that will substitute for many others has been the geek’s holy grail for decades now. We all nurture the fantasy that someday we will be able to replace that unmoveable desktop, that portable but still unwieldy laptop, that iPod, that iPhone, that iPad, and that Sony movie camera with one device that will fit into our pockets. And this device will enable us to compute, correspond, video-conference, browse, read books, listen to music, watch movies, shoot pictures and do anything we may ever want to do from home, at the office or while on the move. [caption id=“attachment_327802” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“Why convergence is a myth. Reuters”]  [/caption] It is a vain hope. True convergence at that level is a myth that will never happen. No matter what anyone tells you, the chances are that we will have to manage loads of separate devices.  Which is why long after you have bought your multi-use Samsung Galaxy SIII – which I still might do, after checking out the HTC One X rival – you will still have to buy other devices that do what the Galaxy SIII threatens to do for us. You may disagree, and point out that convergence is reality. Most smartphones today allow you to shoot pictures and browse email and the internet. That’s three jobs in one device already. True. But the results will be suboptimal. The BlackBerry (at least the lower end phones now popular in India) has great email capabilities and a robust messenger, but it has a so-so phone and really lousy camera. The iPad, which wowed one and all when it was introduced by Steve Jobs two years ago, is a great device for internet consumption, but not for production of content. You can’t write on it easily – for which you need to invest in a wireless keyboard. But if you do that, we are already into two devices, not one. Hardly convergence. But, you may say, the fact that we don’t have a truly convergent device today does not mean we will not have one when technology is much improved in future? Well, sure, let’s hope something comes up. But I wouldn’t bet my shirt on it. For three reasons. First, as marketing guru Al Ries is never tired of reminding us, markets always diverge, not converge. You can start with a phone market, but once a camera is added to it, it develops a new market. Sometimes the old market may die out (nobody may want a camera-less phone in future), but there’s no doubt that the market has diverged. Second, a convergent device needs a user-base that also has multiple needs at the same time. The more the number of things an device attempts to do – the lower the number of users at a given price. In theory, any one of us may want a device that does all the things mentioned above, but in practice a viable market is created only if lots of people want every one of those things very badly. This almost never happens. Everyone wants a phone, but does everyone want a camera with it? Or internet browsing? The law of optimisation suggests that a device that is very good as a phone will be relatively expensive if it also has to be a good camera. You can get a basic mobile phone for as little as Rs 1,500 and a 14 MP camera for as little as 4,000-5,000. Try combining the two and you get a Rs 10,000 camera phone – which may not be a great camera. The price difference of the convergent device is at least 50 percent more than owning these devices separately. The minute prices go up, the market narrows and splits. The only people who will pay the higher price are those who want both a reasonably competent camera and a competent phone. Objection, you may say. Almost all phones have cameras – and their costs are falling. This shows that convergent devices are taking over. Actually, the real reason is that scale makes the incremental cost of adding a basic camera to a basic phone so low that most manufacturers find it pointless to separate the two markets. They just throw both capabilities into one device and hope for the best. If what you need is a phone, you won’t mind a camera being thrown in for free. It’s not about a convergent need. Third, convergence is an elusive target because the specialist user will not opt for such devices. If you need a high quality browsing device, you are not going to compromise by buying a smartphone when you can use an iPad. If you just want to read ebooks, you might opt for an Amazon Fire tablet rather than go for a costlier iPad. If you are going to have to do a lot of typing and document scanning on the move, you may still opt for a laptop. If you want to only listen to music, you may use an iPod or at best an iPhone. You won’t buy an iPad. Then why do we hear so much about convergence? One is, of course, the wonder of technology. In just the last 20 years, we have seen devices shrink to small sizes, and computing capabilities multiply prodigiously. So we think anything is possible. And gadgets always excite us – no matter how practically useless. Two, we also are fed up with the reality that we have too many devices to master and manage. Consider this: 20 years ago, we had a desktop. When the laptop came, we thought we could do without the desktop. But the desktop survived in some form – at least at the workplace. So we now have a desktop at the office, and a laptop at home. Or vice-versa. But then came the net book (which was a short-lived phenomenon) and finally the tablet. The tablet has not totally eliminated our need for an occasional desktop or a laptop. Those who can afford it will probably end up buying every device. Then, of course, we have landlines, mobiles, smartphones, flipcams, and what-have-you. Each one of them does something well, but the other tasks not so well. So we buy Sony cameras and iPhones even though the latter can do both. An iPhone may get you good pictures, but we still feel more comfortable video-filming the baby with a Handycam rather than an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy S2. So we are doomed to live with multiple devices in our lifetimes simply because we want the right device for the right job. So forget about the Samsung Galaxy SIII. It isn’t going to make your life any easier. It may have just managed to make it complex. By the time you get to know all its features, an Apple or HTC or someone else will come up with something sexier. But when I wander into a Croma, I will be asked: surely, you can’t not want a lightweight 133-gm, 4.8 inch HD Super Amoled display with 1280 x 720 pixel resolution, an 8 MP camera, a quad-core processor with 1Gb RAM, a voice command module, etc, and all built on Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich? Well, er, when you put it that way, how can I not buy it even if I don’t need it? (Author’s note: A part of this article was written for Entrepreneur magazine)