The mobile phone will inevitably be an important component for smartstores.
Stores that with build in intelligence will use technologies like RFID, smart-shelves, and smart-carts, but they will absolutely have to embrace smartphones to take full advantage for servicing their customers. If customers are carrying around a communications device that can display information, images, and video, then why wouldn’t you use it?
So what are our predictions in the smartphone market? it could turn out to be a three way race for platform choices. That is, iPhone, Windows Embedded, and Android.
This looks very similar to another three way race that has already taken place in the console market. i.e., PlayStation, Xbox, and Wii. Using the lessons learned from that market, could we predict the outcome of the smartphone platform market? If we assume that Windows Mobile is most like the Xbox, the iPhone like the PlayStation 3, and Android as Wii, then it would mean that the smartphone platform with the most users will be Android.
Windows Mobile is like Xbox because apart from being the creation of the same company, they are both proprietary and similarly priced around the middle of the market. I liken the iPhone to PlayStation3 because they are both highly polished and proprietary, and both are at the higher end of the market. Lastly, I compare Android and Wii similarly because they are both the lower end of the market with less hardware features needed to run them. In other words they are both the lighter of the 3 options in their respective markets.
So my pick for a winner in terms of units sold is Android. It will take the lion share of the phone OS market just as Wii has currently taken the biggest slice of the console market.
Android also has other big advantages, listed below:
- It is free.
- It is open.
- It is friendly toward developers with great tools and emulators.
- It is extremely light, so that it can run on medium end cellphones and scale up to laptops.
- It has the biggest Internet brand promoting it, (Google).
With this prediction coupled with developments in retail and smart store technology, it is a good bet that Android will feature many apps that interact with smart stores to enable all kinds of services and information to make the shopping experience interactive, with better communication, wider services, quicker purchasing time, and a more efficient way to hunt out bargains and specials. Supermarkets could get involved and create their own Android apps with names like “Specials of the week” to attract customers into their stores.
Keep an eye out for Android over the coming years. Perhaps in about 5 years when you find yourself scanning
a product in your local smart store with your Android smartphone, you will be able to think how much the retail experience has changed in such a short amount of time.
