It depends on your perspective. For lawyers, the mobile space has probably never been more exciting. For the rest of us...
Apple is a company that has a flash of absolute brilliance every 3-5 years, then proceeds to milk it for everything they've got. Normally, by the time the competition managed to catch up, they had moved on to their next flash of brilliance, but now we get lawsuits instead, so one can't help but wonder if when they went to the idea well this time, it was dry. Tim Cook is basically Apple's answer to Steve Ballmer after all. He's a businessman, not a crazy artist type like Jobs.
NFC is potentially interesting, though we already lag so far behind Japan in that area what is whiz-bang cool to us is old hat for them. Something like bluetooth could be used for home automation. Think about like a BT garage door opener. You get within about 30ft of your house, a BT transmitter in your car triggers the door to open. Go outside that range, and it closes. Lights could be turned on and off around the house based on NFC sensors at strategic places, registering unique IDs of phones going through the doorway, and turning off the lights when all IDs have registered leaving the room. You could have BT transmitters that attach to landline phones and transfer incoming calls to your cell phone. I should consider patenting some of these ideas and supplementing my income through some good old fashioned patent trolling.
Google Now in Android has some potential in the future. Right now it's kind of boring and not overly useful, but given some time, people may be able to figure out some pretty interesting applications for it. Siri just seemed like a pointless gimmick to me, while Google Now is at least providing the potential for something actually useful. Time will tell if that potential is realized.
What I would dearly love to see though, is for mobile carriers to see the problem between pushing data hungry devices on the one end, and then clamping down on the amount of data people can actually use. Yes, I know that one is a pipe dream, because the carriers love hitting us coming and going, but I can dream.
Facebook
Twitter