Do you love your phone?

It used to be that phones were devices to make phone calls, send text, and eventually browse the mobile web. Now, they do so much more. A smartphone is almost like a computer, with access to a camera, GPS, running apps and games of all sort, and much more. It’s perhaps no wonder that the close, personal relationship many people have with their computers has been extended to their phones. Indeed, Apple and other phone makers no longer introduce new products as simple communication devices, but as life style items. Their presentations, like the latest iPhone 4S announcement, is filled with words like beautiful, magical and great.

But do you love your smartphone? As phones become more sophisticated, it seems we feel less ambivalent about them, and instead we polarize on one side of the issue. Either we love them, or we hate them. The ironic part is that today’s smartphones have reasons to be hated and loved at the same time. Let’s look at some of the features that were added to make our life easier. The iPhone 4S’s Siri feature is certainly positioned directly in the realm of user interface improvements. Very few people like to type long sentences on an onscreen keyboard, so having an artificial intelligence to which we can talk to, and who understands us, is a major improvement. It’s not only a cool feature, but something that removes a common frustration in using a smartphone, typing on a small keyboard, and making it into something that’s pleasant to do.

Another user interface issue that can drastically affect whether we enjoy using our smartphone is something that’s out of the control of phone makers: web sites. Let’s face it, even if a lot of sites offer mobile apps, we still have to browse the web quite often. Either someone sent us a link, or we want to check up on our favorite forum, we end up using the mobile web a lot. But even today, many sites do not have a mobile version. There’s nothing worse than having to spend all your time pinching and zooming around the screen just to read what’s written on a page. As more and more sites include a mobile template, user experience improves, and using a smartphone becomes more enjoyable in the process.

So what will the future look like for phones? As far as hardware features go, smartphones today have most of what’s needed to be a fully functioning computer. Of course, we’ll see better processors, more memory, better screens, but those are gradual improvements. The area where innovation will really happen is in improving our enjoyment of the platform. There has to be a point where regardless of what we want to do, bringing out a smartphone will be as pleasant and efficient to work with than using a laptop. Then, we can truly love our phones.