HispanicBusiness

Imagine visiting ancient ruins and seeing, through a pair of glasses connected to a smartphone, how the site looked before its decay. People could eventually play augmented reality games that could involve laying virtual ambushes around corners in the real world.

"A lot of people are thinking about augmented reality as a possible game changer in mobile computing," said Tobias Hollerer, an assistant professor in computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is researching the field.

Changes in materials could also allow for more radical designs for smartphones and peripherals that connect to them. Corning, a company that makes the glass used in screens for iPhone and other smartphones, has developed a flexible product called Willow Glass. Paul Tompkins, director of commercial technology at Corning, said the thin and strong glass would give designers a way to make devices that have more curves to conform to a part of the body. A wrist device, for example, could display much of the information now on a smartphone.

"We're really working hard on that with a couple of companies," he said. "You can achieve more organic designs."

Then there are seemingly mundane technical breakthroughs that could take away some of the more vexing aspects of smartphones, like the need to worry constantly about keeping them charged. In 2010, Apple filed a patent application for a small fuel-cell power supply that could potentially give the iPhone and iPad enough juice to last for weeks without the need to plug them in.

Mr. Sharma, the mobile analyst, said that cellphone companies in Japan had been working on fuel-cell technology for a long time, but that the technology was still years away from being practical. "Whenever it comes into being in a shape and form that's implementable for smartphones, that will be a dramatic shift," he said.

Consumers have not been sitting on their wallets waiting for the next big bang. If some people appear bored by the repetitive nature of new smartphones, they have not shown it. The market has expanded so much in the past few years, along with Apple's standing in it, that sales of late-model iPhones dwarf those of the original.

In its first full quarter on the market, Apple sold a mere 1.1 million iPhones, accounting for $118 million in revenue. In contrast, the company sold 26 million of the devices last quarter, bringing in $16.25 billion in revenue.

The iPhone 5 shows every sign of repeating the success of its predecessors. Apple said Monday that preorders of the iPhone 5 topped two million in the first 24 hours, more than double the amount of iPhone 4S preorders.

For latecomers, Apple and some of its wireless carrier partners estimated that they could not get them phones until two weeks after Friday, when the iPhone 5 is set to become available in stores.

Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, called orders for the phone "incredible." Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, heralded the iPhone 5 at an event last week to introduce the product. He called it "the biggest thing to happen to iPhone since the iPhone."

Others, outside the Apple marketing echo chamber, who saw less impressive changes are picking up on the natural downshifting of technology into periods of slower evolutionary change after a big disruption. It happened with autos and home appliances. It happened with PCs.

After Apple's introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, the broader technology business settled on mice and graphical user interfaces as essential features of personal computers. The industry spent the next two decades producing variations on that theme. The stability of underlying computing platforms allowed the software industry to flourish and made it easier for people to operate the machines.

Similarly, for much of the cellphone and technology businesses, Apple crystallized a compelling vision for the modern smartphone. They would have multitouch screens and sensors like accelerometers for determining the orientation of the device; powerful software for taking advantage of that gear with intuitive finger movement; and an app store for unleashing the creativity of independent software developers.

Many of the central technologies in the original iPhone may have been invented before by other companies, but Apple packaged them in a unique and elegant way, and marketed the result to a mass audience with its customary panache.

Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley investor who helped shape Apple's marketing during its formative years, said the arrival of a computer company in the phone market had redefined the potential for the device. "It was a real revolution," Mr. McKenna said. "It began to bring in a whole vast world of digital opportunity. Voice is really a fairly small part of what we call the phone today."

The difference in smartphones from year to year may not seem spectacular, as Apple and its competitors, like Google, Samsung, Microsoft and even Nokia, push their new smartphones forward a bit more every year, like marathoners trying with each race to better their personal bests by minutes. But the long arc of technological progress is.

Said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, "Five years of incremental change can be very substantial change five years later."