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Things your smartphone has replaced

At $900, the first smartphone was launched 20 years ago. You may not realise it, but today you hold in your hand a multi-thousand-dollar device.

Bonnie Tubbs
By Bonnie Tubbs, ITWeb telecoms editor.
Johannesburg, 21 Aug 2014

Techies and gadget geeks everywhere, rejoice! IBM has just brought to market the latest in cutting-edge smartphone technology. Weighing only half a kilogram and with a battery life of up to one whole hour, the 23cm-long IBM Simon boasts state-of-the-art mobile phone innovation.

Featuring a green LCD screen, stylus and - get this - touch-screen technology, this handheld tour de force enables you to accept phone calls, write notes, update calendar and contacts, draw, and even send and receive faxes. The best part, you ask? All of this, for only $900.

That was 20 years ago, almost to the day. Nowadays, the skinny, 100+ gram device you hold in your hand on a daily basis has the ability to record video footage and capture multimillion-pixel photographs, navigate your journey, give you access to some of your favourite games and music, wake you up in the morning, send messages instantaneously to anywhere in the world, and even pay bills - to mention a broad few.

In fact, there are things your smartphone can do that I'd bet innovators 20 years ago could never have conceived would come from mobile technology.

Money talk

Today, the average high-end smartphone - many bells and whistles included - costs around R8 000. And this year in particular has seen a big move, by manufacturers and mobile operators alike, towards devices that offer close to a high-end experience (or at least, with most of the applications users expect) at a fraction of the price. In some cases, at less than an eighth of the price.

From $900 for a clunky phone with an address book, faxing capabilities and a drawing pad two decades ago, to between about $50 and $750 for sleek, multi-purpose tool most people could not imagine living without, smartphones have come a long way.

It's hard to quantify just how far the indispensable devices have become, but I'll give it a try: a Garmin N"uvi 55LM GPS would cost around R1 899; a Casio analogue alarm clock, maybe R109; an Apple iPod Shuffle, R739 - or thereabouts; a Sony ICD-PX333 dictaphone, R956; a Nikon COOLPIX S02 13.2 MP digital camera, around R1 350; a Sony PSP E1000 game console these days costs about R1 515; you can't really get away with paying much less than about R1 000 for a respectable looking watch; a video cam - like the Sony HD 60P camcorder - costs about R12 500; a Motorola D1002 cordless phone goes for around R750; a DStv Walka for R700; and a Huawei LTE WiFi router B593 R2 334.

That is just scraping the surface, and it already amounts to R23 152.

Multi tool

Speaking to industry experts, these are some of the things they reckon smartphones have replaced - and are likely to replace in future: a landline or desktop phone, calculators, egg timers, stop watches, torches, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, FM radio, newspapers and magazines, shopping lists, ATMs, remote controls, e-readers, recipe books, and even perhaps ID books and credit cards one day.

There are things your smartphone can do that I'd bet innovators 20 years ago could never have conceived would come from mobile technology.

While all this is great (and makes for less electronic clutter in our lives) - industry observers agree there is one entirely invaluable thing smartphones have given us - and that is access to information. Second to this, the ability to network and socialise with anyone in the world, from anywhere in the world (unless you are in certain parts of the north of Johannesburg, like Bryanston, Strathavon or Beverley).

Societal and economic advances over the past couple of decades have been attributed to the fact that access to information has become - and is continuously becoming - more accessible to more people. In fact, the World Bank links access to information - albeit indirectly - to GDP growth, with low- and medium-income countries benefitting more than high-income ones.

There are more cellphones than there are people in SA, with the feature-to-smartphone ratio shifting ever more towards the latter - to the point, analysts say, that the feature phone is going extinct.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation says ICTs open fresh pathways for transforming the way people live, work, learn and communicate.

The notion that knowledge is power is an ancient one. In 1775 - way before the iPhone was even a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye - Samuel Johnson wrote: "All knowledge is, of itself of some value." Many would say it is utterly invaluable.

Samsung Galaxy S5: R9 000. Things your smartphone has replaced: R22 000. Access to information: priceless.

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