Lab Soft News: Does the Smartphone/App Phone Provide More Functionality Than the PC?

I had come to the opinion that smartphones were the rough equivalent of PCs in terms of functionality and certainly the fastest growing IT device (see: Smartphones as the New PCs; Connecting to Healthcare Professionals and Consumers). I have also discussed the huge demand for "apps" (i.e, applications) installed on these devices, including a number designed specifically for physician use such as Epocrates (see: New Definition for "Apps": The Smartphone Market for Medical Software). A recent article by David Pogue of the NYT asserted that smartphones are not like PCs -- they are superior to them (see: New iPhone Apps Put You in the Mix). Below is an excerpt form his article:

People always say that an app phone — an iPhone or Android, for example — is like a cross between a phone and a laptop. Sorry, but that’s nuts. An app phone is equipped completely differently from either a phone or a laptop. It has a touch screen, audio inputs and outputs, video inputs and outputs, GPS, tilt sensor, light sensor, proximity sensor, three different kinds of wireless connections — it’s an utterly different beast. You can’t draw a straight-line graph that connects a cellphone, app phone and laptop; you’d need a triangle. The result of this unique equipment list is that an app phone can run apps (small, dedicated-purpose programs) the likes of which the world has never seen before. Among the 200,000 programs available for the iPhone, for example, two new ones hammer home the point. Both are intended to transform your subpar singing voice into something professional and amazing, both represent a compelling intersection of pop culture and pop tech, and both rely on the iPhone’s unique feature inventory to do it. Both will bring you more satisfying, creative joy than you’d ever expect from a phone.

First of all, it appears from this article that the name for smartphone has changed -- they are now being referred to as app phones. This makes sense in view of the many thousands of applications that can be installed and run on them and are the major distinguishing feature from their predecessor cell phones. Pogue's comparison of the app phone to the PC caught be by surprise and I think that he's right. There's only one major set of tasks that you can't do as well on an app phone -- compose lengthy emails and edit complex documents. In tech-speak, app phones are more useful for content consumption than content creation, although this paradigm now seems to be changing with regard to editing videos (see: iPhone 4: How Steve Jobs Redefined the Smartphone...Again).

Putting all of this together, we are now in the steep part of the development curve in terms of the number and functionality of apps that are available for app phones. Moreover, we now have a formidable set of challengers to the iPhone in this market -- a wide array of Android phones that are very competitive in terms of their functionality. As only one example, video conferencing via app phones will soon be commonplace. Given the speed with which young people, including young physicians, are adopting this new technology, I would suggest that all clinical labs will need to scramble to provide ready access to both lab and surgical pathology data, including images, via these devices. Our previous excuses for not providing access such as HIPAA will no longer satisfy these young consumers who have grown up assuming that all important data can be accessed when and where they need and want it.