Iphone 4S: Totally desirable – but not entirely necessary

SMARTPHONES have developed faster than an X Factor makeover: from the launch of the revolutionary iPhone in January 2007, sales of smartphones are expected to hit 1.03 billion units by 2015, according to research firm iSuppli. But do we really need yet another upgrade?

Electronics manufacturers aren’t stupid – they realise that you don’t really need an extra few megahertz to watch the next episode of Spooks, or need an extra half-inch of screen real estate to read the latest Dan Brown e-book.

But in a Machiavellian trinity, the manufacturers, mobile phone networks and high street shops will do their best to persuade you that you really do need Beats Audio in your HTC Sensation XE, or those few extra millimetres shaved off the width of the latest iPhone glistening in their window.

If you’re willing to get your hands a little greasy, there is plenty to be done under the hood of your smartphone that can almost “future-proof” it.

For iPhone users, there’s the cat and mouse game of “jailbreaking” – installing a modified or “cracked” version of the iOS operating system.

Cracking Apple’s walled garden doesn’t please Steve Jobs (or his successor Tim Cook), but the benefits can include access to banned apps such as MXTube, which allows offline viewing of YouTube clips; unlocking to enable operation on any mobile network; or a non-Apple-approved facelift of the user interface.

If voiding your warranty doesn’t seem worth it for these minor modifications, you can take your future-proofing to another level with an Android-based smartphone. The open source nature of Google’s operating system has left it ripe for the plucking, with some of the most popular hacks, such as the free CyanogenMod, having an estimated 500,000 users. Its strength is in its legions of enthusiastic followers keenly adding features like smartphone conversion into a Wii controller – yes, it works – or over-clocking the CPU to increase performance.

If all this sounds like hard work, before you shell out for another upgrade, remember that the current iPhone has access to more than 425,000 apps – very few of which are going to be improved, despite what Mr Cook may proclaim as he unveils another unnecessary-but-totally-desirable slab of electronics.

• Josh Welensky is The Scotsman Magazine’s technology writer