Characterizing the technological evolution of smartphones: Insights from performance benchmarks

Abstract

Recent technological advancements in smartphone have paved the way for the rapidly growing mobile commerce. As smartphone vendors launch the products with a rich variety of technical features for different end-user market segments, understanding the evolution of these features is of vital importance to all stakeholders in the smartphone industry. We address this issue by exploring technical specifications of smartphones at both the feature and the device level. In particular, we introduce the benchmarks to operationalize the overall performance of smartphone models, such that multidimensional technical features can be quantitatively summarized into a single index. Through the analysis of a comprehensive dataset entailing technical features for smartphone models launched during the years 2012-2015, we show that although certain features have become the standard functionality, the smartphone industry is largely innovative and continues to evolve over time. We believe our findings may provide important insights into the future development and design strategies of smartphones.