Smartphone History: Evolution & Revolution by Bruce Taplin

Author:Bruce Taplin [Taplin, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Computers & Technology, Networking, Internet; Groupware; & Telecommunications, Engineering & Transportation, Engineering, Reference, Patents & Inventions, Telecommunications & Sensors, Professional & Technical, Telecommunications
Amazon: B00B16F1IS
Publisher: Bruce Taplin
Published: 2013-01-14T06:00:00+00:00

The New Industrial Revolution

All new industries create spin off industries and the smartphone industry is no different. While this trait is shared with other industrial revolutions of the past there are several crucial differences between this industrial revolution and the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Firstly this current revolution doesn’t require a huge shift of the population into concentrated areas so that they can be employed in vast numbers in the new manufacturing centres that sprang up. In fact the smartphone industrial revolution can lead to the depopulation of our cities as developers can set up shop anywhere in the world as long as they have access to the internet.

Secondly the ability to make money out of this revolution is not available to only a select group of people with money and/or land. Anybody can participate in the smartphone revolution. They don’t even need any special skill or expertise. All someone needs is an idea and a plan and they can get someone else to make the idea a reality for less than $1000 (although complex apps, especially gaming apps can cost considerably more).

And lastly the current smartphone industry is nowhere near as invasive on the environment as previous major industrial shifts were with their heavy reliance on fossil fuels and raw materials. There were practically no restrictions on what industry could do to the environment in the past. Today’s smartphone app revolution is created from thought and ether. The richest veins of gold consist of electric currents and computer code which don’t need to be mined or fashioned in a smog spewing factory.

Although many of the downstream industries are environmentally friendly we still have to be wary about some of the environmental hazards that smartphone hardware can create like waste disposal and radioactive material. There is also the spectre of sweat shops in Asia which have damaged the image of the likes of Apple.

We need to remain on guard to ensure that the worst practices of the original industrial revolution do not revisit mankind again. I will discuss this topic in more detail in the next section.

The creation of applications for smartphones is a multi-billion dollar business. To illustrate how big the app market is the gaming app called Angry Birds had its one billionth download in May 2012! Even more sobering is the fact that the app was only launched in December 2009 initially on Apple’s iOS system but other smartphone OS versions followed as Angry Birds’ popularity grew. The one billion download mark was reached in only 30 months, or 130 weeks, or 910 days, which meant that it averaged approximately 1.098 million downloads per day over the two and half years it took to reach one billion downloads. These figures are truly astounding and they can give you a headache of fits of jealousy; in fact they are difficult to comprehend but they illustrate the power of this new industrial revolution.

In the last week of December 2012, a festive week when it has been

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