Eighty percent of the planet's population owns one, so where to next for the smartphone?

Are the days of widely exciting new products like the iPhone over? Have we reached peak smartphone innovation, asks Diarmaid Condon.

ALTHOUGH the smartphone is practically ubiquitous in the Western world, it is easy to forget it really only became a widespread consumer product in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone by Apple.

Smartphones have been with us in one guise or another since the launch of the IBM Simon in 1994, but it was Apple, with the phenomenal market share and brand recognition of the iPod music player behind it, that really brought it to the fore as a challenger to a mobile phone market then dominated by Nokia.