What if there were no smartphones?

Czar Kaizer

Banned
So in the last decade smartphones have become part of our everyday lives, but what might the world today look like without them? What could replace them?
 
No (or fewer) navel-gazing screeds about how the youth of today can't be bothered to look up from their screens to appreciate the "real world", I guess.
 
No (or fewer) navel-gazing screeds about how the youth of today can't be bothered to look up from their screens to appreciate the "real world", I guess.
Given that those complaints have been around for centuries if not millennia, they'll be made about something else instead.

The smartphone is basically a combination PDA and mobile phone; both are desirable to business users, and it makes sense that they would be combined at some point. I think the best that can be done is for smartphones to inherit the emotional baggage of PDAs - something that you might have for work, but you wouldn't own one for personal use.
 

I know a lot of people who still use pagers, actually - mostly doctors, but also some folks who work in buildings with crap cell phone reception. And, anyway, I'd argue that "dumbphones" replace pagers, too - especially with text messaging.

Though, getting rid of text messaging could go a long way to killing smartphones, as it was a big portion of the push towards universal keyboards, which in turn was a big part of the push to big screens. The other part is email, of course, but there was a period of a good few years when email on your phone was limited to Blackberries and was considered to be for serious professionals only.

Given that those complaints have been around for centuries if not millennia, they'll be made about something else instead.

The smartphone is basically a combination PDA and mobile phone; both are desirable to business users, and it makes sense that they would be combined at some point. I think the best that can be done is for smartphones to inherit the emotional baggage of PDAs - something that you might have for work, but you wouldn't own one for personal use.

I'm not sure about killing smartphones entirely, but I think that without a few major turning points (notably the iPhone), it shouldn't be hard to delay widespread adoption of smartphones, keeping them the expensive tools of overworked professionals for at least another decade.


Things to kill:
-Text messaging (this is pretty easy; just have cell providers refuse to let consumers use their messaging system)
-mobile internet (harder to kill, but not impossible - in particular via FCC and ITU, and also ETSI. Hell, ETSI might be the easiest; they decide it's not their place to regulate it at the EU instead of national level, and then the national bodies fail to handle it wellO
-The iPhone (made smartphones cool and sexy)

With these things dead, smartphones can remain the clunky, expensive tools of businessmen and politicians...for a time. Eventually, they'll get cheaper, and eventually they'll get more popular (like cell phones in the first place, actually!)
 
Fun fact: my father in law worked in British Telecom during the 80's when mobile phone technology was moving from 'it works fine in the lab!' to something more commercially applicable.

One thing that stands out in his mind is the fact that the text message feature was a last minute addition to the designs - and it was resisted by a lot of managers as they really didn't see why anyone would want to communicate via clumsy characters, as opposed to talking to calling someone...
 
I'd say it's almsot impossible. You had combination of cell phones becoming widely available nd making such small devicas capable of being smart, driven by improvments in computer technology. It was just a matter of time before two make a smarty phone thingy baby.
 
Top