The ho-hum era of smartphones has begun

Nokia's Lumia 920, a Windows 8 phone

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

commentary Smartphones are great. But it's time to lower your expectations, because the smartphone industry has moved from an era of revolutionary improvement to a much more bland era of incremental refinement.

Progress will continue, to be sure: screens will get better, networks will get faster, prices will come down. But these days, it's just a lot harder to come up with a smartphone that makes last year's model look like an outdated relic.

This week, we'll see what Apple has in store for the next-gen iPhone. I have no doubt it will be technically impressive and will sell like hotcakes. But unless Apple has a big trick up its sleeve, the phone paradigm is going to remain unshifted.

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