Friday, March 29, 2024

A Decade of Smartphones: The State of the Mobile World Today

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Ten years have passed since the gadget that changed the way we look at portable communication. I’m talking about the first iPhone, of course, a handset that didn’t bring many revolutionary changes to the phone hardware itself but brought forth fundamental changes in the way we think of smartphones. The decade that has passed ever since has seen the smartphone evolving at an incredible pace. Its screen has grown, and so did its processing power, its capabilities, and its storage space. The effects of the smartphone were widespread: its insane success has sped up the development of mobile broadband, batteries, compact cameras, and many others. Besides, the smartphone has spawned completely new industries, bringing forward the “app”, a brand new business model combining the traits of products and services.

Today, a decade after its advent, the smartphone has reached the apogee of its evolution – at least in its current form. This leaves us with a pressing question: should we still believe the hype of futuretech?

Collateral businesses

A smartphone in itself can’t do much more than a dumb one. It needs applications – apps – to expand its capabilities. These apps come in many shapes and sizes: some of them need to be downloaded and installed on a smartphone, much like in the case of a desktop computer. Others, like the Euro Palace Mobile, “live” inside web browser windows on any device capable of connecting to the internet. Both of them have their advantages – the games at the Euro Palace are far less hardware-hungry than their downloadable counterparts, yet they lack their access to the phones’ hardware and their scalability. This doesn’t make playing at the Euro Palace any less fun, only more accessible and fast.

The rise of the smartphone has led to the emergence of many new industries, centered around its portability. Apps and games are aware of the users’ whereabouts, and offer them the right information at the right time. Games incorporate the players’ surroundings, mixing reality with virtuality. These apps and games have created tens of thousands of jobs, billions in revenues, and brand new ways for us to use the smartphone.

The state of the mobile world today

When it comes to hardware, smartphones can’t really get much better than what we have today. Eight processing cores, gigabytes of RAM, hundreds of gigabytes of storage, extremely fast mobile broadband connections, amazing cameras, batteries with an ever-increasing capacity, and graphics that match today’s top gaming consoles – these have all been created today. If smartphones follow the same direction, they will have nothing spectacular to offer this year. Now the time has come for new, meaningful uses for them to be invented – and this change will be brought forward by software developers who dare to dream big.

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