Huawei thinks “superphones” will replace smartphones by 2020

Smartphones as we know them will be replaced by “superphones” within the next five years. At least, that’s what Huawei believes, and it’s basing this prediction on the fact that it took twelve years for regular handsets to evolve from the first commercial mobile phone that Motorola released back in 1995, to the first smartphone that Apple released in 2007. Assuming the next major upgrade to mobile phones will follow the same pattern, we should expect superphones to arrive sometime in 2019 or 2020. Not the soundest logic, but an interesting prediction nonetheless. 

The rising of the sun each day, the Super Bowl, a re-emerging public fascination with David Hasselhoff, farewell tours from the rock band KISS … these are things that can be observed to come and go in cycles, like many things in life. It can be argued that invention follows a similar cycle as well — but it usually takes a look back at history to point it out. Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, believes that these same cycles can be applied to the evolution of and technology leaps seen in smartphones, and that the next generation will produce something the company sees as a “superphone.” “Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone,” said Huawei’s Shao Yang as he spoke in Singapore at Huawei Innovation Day Asia. Yang is President of Strategy Marketing at Huawei Consumer Business Group, and by his estimates and observance of history, smartphones make leaps of invention on a 12-year cycle. The first feature phone came from Motorola back in 1995. Twelve years later, Apple came out with the first smartphone, in 2007. His thinking jumps ahead to 2020, when twelve more years will have passed and the superphone will arrive.