This morning’s Observer column.

Leave aside the fact that it was Apple that triggered the most recent explosion in the mobile industry – the smartphone revolution – and ponder what was actually on show in Barcelona. The answer, in the words of one astute and unsentimental observer, Professor Barry Avery, was: “Many phones, little innovation.” (Shades of Yeats’s pithy description of his – and my – native land: “Great hatred, little room.”)

“The message coming out of this year’s event,” wrote Avery, “is that while there are lots of new phones coming, we shouldn’t expect a great technological leap from any of them. Most of the phones are incremental updates, running the latest version of Android’s mobile phone operating system KitKat.”

Avery is too polite. The truth is that the mobile phone industry has run out of ideas. Every single smartphone in the market is basically just a variation on the Apple iPhone theme. And the variations, such as they are, are looking increasingly – and desperately – baroque…