Are mobile phones more influential than PC’s?
If "Video Killed the Radiostar", mobile phones have been serial killers of home phones and they’ve seriously maimed and made their impression on cameras, television, music, and the Internet.
PCs came into the world as unique devices. There was nothing comparable prior to their existence. They made many tedious tasks more efficient and enjoyable. They changed the way many of us shopped, communicated with long distance friends and relatives, and the way we worked and played. But the PC was new. While it often replaced the way we did things, it didn’t replace an existing technology on the massive level that mobile phones have. Mobile phones have displaced or reshaped several other technologies: smartphones even more so.
Not only have phones and cameras been replaced, in some instances mp3 and CD players, and sometimes even PCs themselves are being made obsolete by the smartphone. I’m still dumbfounded by the fact that my Treo 700p uses (2 Gigabyte) SD cards that hold as much information as my first computer did. And there are larger SD cards out there!
The Internet is being transformed by mobile phones. CNN, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo are just a few of the sites that have made themselves more accessible via mobile phone.
Even television and streaming video is available to smartphone owners. The PC and mobile phone are both brilliant pieces of technology. But it’s definitely the mobile phone that’s proving itself the most influential technology.
Filed under: Editorials
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The majority of smartphone users are either already computer literate or were required to be more in touch with the office and email wherever you are is a good thing “if you need it” .
Personally having been around when the first personal computers came along I think that they did change a lot more than you think and they did lead to the smartphone, both have had a large impact on everyones daily life if you use them or not they still affect your lifestyle to some extent.
Examples of how computers have affected your daily life would be: your television converter is computerized, your car if newer than a 1977 is computerized, your coffeemaker might be… if you can set it to make your coffee in the morning it is, Do you use bank machines?, does your stereo have presets?, do your kids play organized sports… the scoreboards in hockey rinks are computerized… the list of how PC’s and the chips to build them are used in your daily life is almost endless.. Cell phones on the other hand are a lot more noticeably invasive, ever notice how many seemingly schizophenic people we have walking the streets these days all wandering along seeming to have conversations with themselves? ;-)
I do think the smartphones will have more of an impact on the everyday individual then PC’s had originally, and there is still more that can be thought up for them to be able to do.
The author is showing her youth! My first computer had 4K of memory and a tape recorder for program storage. The first PC I used that had a hard drive was 20Mb. If I recall correctly, 2 Gb hard drives did not arrive until after the web started becoming popular.
The PC definitely came a long way! My first “smartphone” plugged into a springboard slot of my PDA. I recongnized at that time the value of these devices converging. The smartphone is only now beginning it’s transition from “early adoptors” to mainstream use. My (currently in use) Treo 600 will go down ib history as being analogous with that 8086 PC with the 20 Mb hard drive that I mentioned. The Treo 600 was the first truely useful and convergent smartphone. (The Treo 270 and 300 are really the first, but only a few of us bought them.)
Yes, I agree that the smartphone is influential, but it will contine to transform and converge in the years ahead. Imagine a LifeDrive and phone with EVDO converged with the style of the current Treos, a multi tasking, Linux OS, all the functionality and storage of a PC, streamable music whose “license” floats to whatever device you are using at the time, social networking apps on everyone’s phones, bittorrent sharing among these devices, and all sorts of other cool stuff. (I guess the thing above with the least chance of success is the floating music license. Oh well, I can dream!) My point is that I believe most of the “influence” of the smartphone is yet to come. I think we’ve only seen maybe 5% of where the smartphone will go so far.
– Bob
Not yet, but soon they will be