People of the world today have a new addiction. This addiction is the smartphone. These smartphones not only provide the same features a personal computer would but can be a source of entertainment. Many of us rely on smartphones to get through our day, to achieve our work, to locate places to be, and to stay connected with society, family and friends.
Smart phones have become a vital part of our lives and without them we feel like only half a person. This study will focus on how to help others to grasp the techniques smartphone technology changes society, understand the impact of change and fashion in which we live our lives, and how smartphones became revolutionary to the world. “An iPod. A Phone. And an Internet communicator.” The iPhone was unlike anything that had come before it. It combined a mobile phone and a music player in an easy to use package, leveraging (some might say cannibalizing) the popularity of the iPod.
That first iPhone introduced us to the concept of apps and social media on-the-go. The iPhone play a vital role offering users an accessible platform for communication and to wide range of applications, while changing how people interact in the world. The iPhone made a global debut in 2007 and was first introduced into the world of technology. This outcome grew tense with expectations for other smart phone companies. When Steve Jobs announced the debut of the first iPhone, he annotated it to be “your life in your pocket”. These devices possess many useful features which more people are gradually attracted to. The latest generation of smart phones are furnished with more prominent social applications and an extensive entertaining function to anyone who cares for social media. In fact, social networking is one of the core reasons the iPhone became so popular.
Smart phones have become an attractive option for sensing human and social behavior. Anything nowadays can be achieved with a tap on the screen or a click of a mouse.Today, people are more likely able connect with others and know what events are occurring or in the future with the access of popular social networks. These social media platforms are a new trend in online communication.
Therefore, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter apps dominate a folder on people’s home screen of their phones. Leading from Harris Interactive study, “second to clothing, teens say a smart phone tells the most about a person’s social status or popularity, outranking jewelry, watches and shoes”,(Wirelessandmobilenews, 2010). Built from the study above, smart phones are becoming an essential to socialize which teens prioritize to do. From talking through a screen to verbally talking, and logging on to social networking sites, teens carry smart phones to contact with friends, family and current events.
In addition, real-time video calls make it possible to talk with each other on the move, but also see each other through facial expressions. Quotes, “Our dependency is such that many of us reach for our phones as soon as we wake and then go on to check them on average every six and a half minutes over the course of a day.” Therefore, smart phone is a necessity in which people cannot leave their sight from.
In my opinion, smart phone obtains beneficial applications which will eventually replace the PC in the next decade. It is undeniable that smart phones have definitely affected our lives to be more convenient in serval ways. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate, and what people envisioned to be impossible a few years ago has now transformed into a reality.
The main motive people use their smartphones is to be provided with entertainment and stay connected to people all across the world through social media. Entering into social networking platforms presents to the users a better avenue to exposure and improve in all facets of life. For example, be in any industry vertical, smartphones give an opportunity and you can witness people using their smartphones for their comfort and convenience. In primitive years, technology has always been applied to invent tools in order to solve problems. These advancements in the field have made an effect on people to become more efficient on both macro- and microscopic level. However, smart phones have also changed the perception of ways people could interact with each other.
With texting, it allows its user to carry out a conversation without the need to show their personal expressions. Unlike a face-to-face conversation, which is composed with direct eye contact, smart phone allows its users to “say things you would contemplate to say in face-to-face contact”. This can be a key resource to why people utilize smart phones for discussion if they prefer not to have in person. As a result, we are dawn to lose the face-to-face contact that was once a fundamental part of our lives in the past. The contact with real-time voice call is being replaced by multimedia messages implementation of smart phones.
Tech and new media are fundamentally changing human interaction and we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Our society tends to manipulate devices that make our lives simple and more convenient. Taking this fact into consideration, the mobile industry developed one device that made several others discarded. Sales plummeted for landline phones, desktop computers, mp3 players, gps devices, etc. It was not too long ago was there a time when it was vital to carry all these things with you.
To evaluate the positive impact of smart phones on our society, there are two major sectors which have immensely affected by smart phones—business and socialization. Over the years, the number of smart phone users has skyrocketed. According to a research article of a company’s longitudinal survey, “about 42 percent of Americans owned smart phones in December 2009” (mobilehealthnews, 2010). It is predicted smart phones to flourish the market in the next decade as Cody Barbierri has mentioned in his article “smart phones are one of the hottest growth sectors in our economy right now.
Usage continues to grow, even after significant growth over the past two years” (Cody Barbierri, 2010). With powerful and influential applications, smart phones allow its users to collaborate with their work and extend their social connection in many ways. It enabled users to connect to anyone at any time from almost anywhere. Web browsers, e-book readers, GPS are the most which all smart phones bring to its users.
Imagine the time before smart phones were well developed; it was impossible to shop online while you transported to your destination without a PC or laptop. Nowadays, with the breakthrough of smart phones, shopping online became easy as making a phone call. As a useful mobile device for modern society, smart phone is the most productive technology that I have ever witnessed. Not only does it provide a substantial feature, but it has become an essential mobile device which people cannot leave anywhere without it. However, with ever good thing in life, there are bad things that comes with it as well.
Smart phones have some negative impacts as well, consequently people should consider before owning one. In the decade that’s followed, the iPhone has stimulated a societal shift. Now, we are always connected to our friends, to work and to those we aspire to be. Our iPhones are our nearby distractions, allowing us to escape into a beaver’s hole of mobile games that once strictly required a whole gaming system to run, access to every genre of music, and browse practically all of human knowledge (Reddit, Facebook and Twitter). These applications turned into everyday essentials to help us find and build communities. If you reckon these activities 25 years ago, some of them were not even attainable, now it can be performed from one single device.
The iPhone has inspired in a decade since its origination have gone beyond “convenience” to “lifeline.” But one of the greatest impacts of smartphones has to do with information: with them (and, of course, the Internet), information is available to smartphone users at almost any time and any place. For example, nowadays we can search anything almost instantaneously, something that, on a more humorous note, would render the inception of the Guinness Book of Records completely useless. Almost everything on the Internet can now be accessed with a smartphone, and people are taking advantage of it – so much that, since 2014, we are browsing more on mobiles than on desktops.A few revolutionary parts of the iPhone were keyboards, touchscreens, Appstore and portability. The early iPhone days were overpowered by Blackberry, the Canadian mobile phone creator, and no one at the time could have think of a smartphone without a physical keyboard. Nowadays, it is rare to find a smartphone with hard-pressed keys. I perceive this all-touchscreen design to be Job’s eminent minimalist style.
“They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not,” said Jobs in 2007. This keyboard would dynamically made changes to touch targets above the keyboard as you typed, it would suggest which letters were most likely to be used next, which enhanced the prospect of typing the right letters. The common prospect of the majority of users, the software keyboard has manifested the trade-off to reach international markets without directly outfitting to each country’s language or style of input. The common action of finger motion of pinching and zooming. Almost everything we use touch screens can be achieved using a mouse as an alternative. Zooming, highlighting, and selecting items can all be done with a mouse. If everything can be accomplished by a mouse, then why do we still prefer touch screens? The prominent Italian educator Maria Montessori said, “The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.” We naturally have a better understanding completing tasks with our hands, and the capacitive touch screens like the iPhone, became an extension of our hands.
For example, present toddlers easily gravitate to a tablet to navigate the screen with their hands before they are able to speak; actions speak louder than words. Although earlier smartphones obtained web-browsing capabilities, it was a diluted experience. In order to explore the internet, this was generally conducted from a PC. Although a few sites were optimized for mobile devices, the heart of the first iPhone’s web-browsing experience, Safari presented a technique to pinch and zoom in the browser.
This method could microscope to read Wall Street Journal or to shop on amazon before an individual app. Smartphones are continuously being developed to operate us and our surroundings, however from these past statements, many of those companies could view iPhone as a conceptual ancestor and inspiration.
