Most mobiles…

Here is a nice piece in the New Scientist, outlining some of the ways smartphones are being used in a variety of important initiatives in the developing world: microfinance, m-banking, civil society, health surveillance, and education.  The crux/core quote: 

“Smartphones are probably much more revolutionary for developing countries,” says John Canny, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is creating educational video games that run on smartphones… “Here smartphones are a bit gimmicky. In the developing regions you have hostile conditions for a PC so phones have a lot of potential to become the computing platform for people,” says Canny.

The article starts by describing some applications which run on basic handsets, and then moves on to detail those which are utilizing more advanced functionality like photography, audio recording, and data transfer. I’d put a slightly finer point on things, and would emphasize that hardware and connectivity costs still limit the settings into which smartphones can be deployed.  What the more broad-based, often occasional, applications lack in processing power they make up in accessibility and ubiquity.  For example, the M-PESA system, like many m-banking systems, runs as well on a $30 handset as it does on a smart $300 handset.

On the other hand, we are seeing fascinating smartphone initiatives, where a relatively small number of devices are distributed into specialized settings with relatively intense informational needs (such as classrooms or microfinance organizations). The costs of the smartphones are often surmountable as long as the devices can be dedicated to certain high-value tasks, or shared between lots of people.  As the cost of smartphone functionality comes down, and as data access becomes more available and affordable, we’ll see these distinctions blur, and the set of possibilities will continue to expand.

One additional comment on the headline, which I think does the otherwise informative article a disservice. Smartphones are a helpful and affordable way to accomplish many of the tasks for which previously one might have wanted to use a PC. But smartphones are not, as the article’s headline asserts, “the PCs of the developing world.” The developing world is now and will be characterized by a higher ratio of mobiles to PCs, but that does not make PCs irrelevant, unaffordable, or unwanted. Ask the local “developing world” hospital, or the university, or Wipro, for that matter, if they are ready to give up their PCs for smartphones.