Age of Smartphones!!!

Do you know the feeling when you go out and suddenly realize you left your phone at home? or worse, you reach in your pocket and realize you left phone in the coffee shop. How would you react? Most of us might run scared to get to our smartphones as if the world is coming to an end, a few others might feel completely lost – If I sum it up: it’s not a very enjoyable feeling.

Now imagine driving down a remote highway, passing through lush green mountains, feeling the cool breeze in your face and you decide to ruin the moment by taking a Selfie with your latest Smartphone, to upload on Facebook. One click and you see, there is no cell phone Signal & phone battery is going to die on you in next few mins...You have a major panic attack, WHY?? Well, anybody addicted to a smartphone could give you at least 5 good reasons in less than 5 seconds. Like it or not, Smartphones have become a vital part of our lives and a moment without seems like an eternity in Hell!.

What is a Smartphone?

Rewind into not so distant past (may be a little over a decade) when cell phones were not that smart, people still had wired landline phones at homes, offices had desktops and if you wanted to get on the Internet your only option was to have a phone cable or Ethernet cable plugged directly into your computer or laptop. WiFi was still in its infancy but believe it or not, Smartphones were around much before this time. First, what is a smartphone? Turns out, the actual definition, no matter the source, is quite vague. Merriam-Webster concisely calls a smartphone “a cell phone that includes additional software functions (as e-mail or an Internet browser).” Oxford Dictionaries, on the other hand, gets a little more precise by saying

A smartphone is able to perform many of the functions of a computer, typically having a relatively large screen and an operating system capable of running general-purpose applications.

A Fascinating Evolution

The very first concept of a smartphone is said to have been envisioned back in the mid-1970s, but that idea didn’t come into fruition until almost 20 years later when IBM’s Simon Personal Communicator first showed its face in 1992. Just imagine this - Simon had a monochrome touchscreen, a stylus, and a charging base station. When using data, you could expect to charge the phone after about 60 minutes of use. Late 90's early 2000 saw emergence of new popular devices from Symbian, BlackBerry OS, Palm OS, and Windows Mobile (then known as PocketPC 2000) became increasingly popular with capabilities such as email, fax, Web browsing, and other enterprise-centric features. Most of these phones had Sliding and flipping keyboards, rotating displays, wafer-style phones. Resistive touchscreen displays found their way onto smartphones, and the popularity of the stylus was born, almost out of sheer need as these early model smartphones were not very finger-friendly. From 2004 to 2007, there was a dramatic rise in smartphone usage, more capable devices found their way into the hands of everyday consumers. As such, the software became slightly more user-friendly, third-party applications and games slowly began to circle Internet forums, and wireless providers began offering the more capable smartphones along with data plans.

The BIG Bang that Changed Smartphones Forever

In 2007, the wireless industry took a dramatic turn. While enthusiasts and non-enterprise users had found other uses for their smartphones than email and work, Smartphones were primarily used for correspondence and light Web browsing. Most of you probably know that Apple announced the iPhone in January 2007 and launched it months later in June. Apple’s idea of the smartphone combined powerful multimedia functions with the same email and Web browsing features as all other smartphones previously had. It had its very own operating system (iOS), a large color display with a capacitive digitizer, and its user interface was finally finger-friendly. This opened floodgates of sorts with many companies like Google answered iOS with its own mobile operating system, Android OS, which became a major competitor to Apple's iOS.

At the same time, WiFi /Wireless chips flooded markets, cheap hardware & memory became available at dirt prices...Suddenly, imagination took Wings and everyone jumped on Smartphone bandwagon with consumers spoiled for choices from most expensive to no-frills cheap smartphones loaded with apps capable of making life easy as well as hell, in no time. Cell phone providers sized the opportunity providing affordable DATA plans that allowed mobility to become true reality - Today's Smartphone arrived with a BANG!!

How Smartphones Change the Way We Live

Fast Forward to Present Day - Most of us use their smartphone every day, to surf the internet and social media platforms, check emails, manage our daily calendars, listen to music, play games, watch videos, take photos, read the news, write text messages and also, every now and then we use them for their original purpose, to make phone calls. All these activities using one single device. If you look back some 20 years ago, it was unimaginable but today we arrogantly take this for granted, as if this is one of our birth rights and not having this access would drastically impact our life.

Changed the way we behave, feel, react & interact with our surroundings - Is this really true? Let's look at our typical day. It starts early in the morning. The first thing we do is reaching for our smartphone to turn off the alarm clock and second is, start checking emails. As the day goes by we use our smartphone on the way to work, during mealtimes, at work, on the way home, in the bathroom and in bed. We are constantly connected and are expected to have a mobile phone with us at all times. Of course, that’s convenient, but being available 24/7 is tiring, it’s a blessing and a curse. “Sorry, I wasn’t at home” worked as an excuse 20 years ago. New age excuses sound more like "oh! sorry my cell phone battery died" but is often frowned upon with a response like "don't act like a moron!! Carry a charger or an extra battery" Today it’s like you never leave the office.

Have you realized lately that there are less and less things that we actually, physically have to go out and do now-a-days than when we did when we were younger? Our kid days were all about outdoors, playing with friends, biking, running crazy until we dropped exhausted. Take a look around your home or neighborhood and you'd see every single kid addicted to a smart screen - could be anything. How often you have exchanged messages with friends over your smartphones sitting right across each other? or sitting in restaurants, coffee shops but heads down busy with their smartphones with no real conversation happening. Today we can stream online movies, play games, attend live meetings, video conference with friends/clients, use online banking, order food, and the list goes on and on...there is practically nothing that you can not do with your smartphone.

Smartphones have made most of recent technological gadgets obsolete like Landline phones, desktop computers, digital cameras, mp3 players, GPS devices, etc. Not too long ago there was a time, when you needed to carry all those things with you. The fact that as many as 80% of all smartphone owners check their smartphone within 15 minutes of waking up should give us a pretty good idea about how much influence this little device has on our everyday endeavors. 24% of people check their smartphones while driving, Another quite mind boggling fact is that 41% of all Americans use Facebook, and on top of that, smartphone users check their Facebook an average of 14 times (!!) a day. As if even that wasn’t enough, 50% of smartphone users also check their Facebook at the movies. Likewise, new age criminals are now using our personal information so gladly that we share over Social Media via Smartphones, that it is becoming a huge security challenge for societies.

Our smartphone is our personal assistant that helps us mastering our everyday life. It is hard to imagine living through a day without your smartphone. While I worry about the downsides, there is no denying the fact that this little device has revolutionized our lives forever and there is no looking back. The future is very promising as well as scary, but that goes with all new & exciting things in life. Isn't that true??