5 Ways Smartphones are Changing the World

Smartphones have crept into our lives to eventually become a vital aspect of it, replacing few day-to-day objects that we nonchalantly used in our lives.

The ability to encapsulate the functionalities of various gadgets into one, today’s smartphone has become an essential commodity for the Y generation. Keeping that in mind, let us have a look at few things that were drastically substituted with the advent of the smartphones.

1. The Entertainment Hub

Sony kicked off the revolutionary Walkman where you could have a portable cassette-player around your hips for your jogging pleasure. Polaroid did the same with its famed range of cameras that dished out photographs spontaneously.

The portable battery-operated radio was another one, and so was Nintendo’s GameBoy. Smartphone took all of that and mish-mashed it together to deliver a device that could play music, click photographs, be a gaming platform and above all, be a central entertainment hub that offers complete portability.

2. Personal Assistant

Your e-mail client, alarm clock, notifier, virtual calendar, task-manager and reminder, smartphone has replaced all the above and more. Few of these aspects were prevalent in our run-of-the-mill mobile phones since their inception, but Android and iOS based smartphones with Siri and Google Now have taken it a step forward by offering more than that.

Command your smartphone to search for a flight from point A to point B on a designated date, and it will do all the hassle of hunting down the perfect flight details for you without you having to do nothing. Getting a dinner reservation to knowing the weather forecast to even managing your schedule around a cricket match, everything is possible.

3. Today’s Newspaper

It was a daily routine, or rather a ritual to bombard our mind with the recent (or a day prior’s) happenings across the world, or simply our country. Reading the newspaper over a cup of tea was a norm for generations. Albeit, smartphones changed the rules of the game when the advent of internet connectivity seeped into our lives to deliver world news at our fingertips.

Apps like Google Reader and various others offer fresh news and happenings from the world over as per your needs, and all that for free! Replacing the hard-copy of a newspaper with that of an e-paper, smartphones changed the way news was delivered, especially in terms of the real-time deliverance that followed.

4. Global Connectivity

It all started with telegrams and telegraphs which later boiled down to your wired telephones that transmitted your voice over lands and oceans with a lag of few seconds. It was expensive, and annoying. The transmission was shoddy at its best, and never gave the satisfaction of having a hearty conversation, leaving us content by hearing our loved ones’ voice.

Blackberry were the first ones to change that who introduced BBM, a messaging service that allowed you to endlessly message a person equipped with a Blackberry mobile anywhere on the globe without charging a bomb. The next wave of smartphones took it a step further and offered instant messaging services like WhatsApp, etc. for various smartphones across different platforms.

The advent of 3G data connectivity saw people using the power of Skype to video chat over the internet. The world had definitely shrunken into a minuscule dot.

5. Total Dependency

As much as we have grown fond of smartphones and the various capabilities they posses, they have taken over our lives in ways and means unimaginable. The phenomenon is such that many people from the third world countries are first introduced to the internet through their smartphones. Things are different elsewhere.

The smartphone dependency is so much that nearly 78% of kids and teenagers possess a smartphone, 54 per cent check their phones while in bed, while nearly 40 per cent check their phones while on the toilet. The statistics are definitely unnerving and clearly state of slavery that we have reached in terms of smartphones. The plight of smartphones have gone to an extent where it is classified as an addiction and blamed to be the root cause of trauma and anxiety among the new generation.

As much as we have gotten accustomed to the advent of smartphones in our day-to-day lives, and the fact that they’ve gone on to become our faithful companion who possess the ability to access any information in the world at our fingertips, we will still use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with complete strangers on Facebook across the world!

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