Since the inception of the phone, humans have become not only more connected to each other but also the hardware they carry in their pockets.
The Evolution Of The Personal Phone
Around 2005, touch screens started to find their way in to smart phones and eventually the iPhone in 2007. This is the first time touch screen technology became so prevalent in consumer electronics and soon an entire culture would spawn around touch screen devices.
Tablets followed suite and introduced the idea of a phone like interface being used for a 10-inch touch screen. These devices were more portable than a laptop and while not as pocketable as a phone, we still manage to bring tablets with us wherever we go.
Along the way, Applications became even more prevalent than they were before and dramatically shifted how we viewed personal gadgets. Hundreds of thousands of Apps total exist for the major phone platforms which gives us a huge plethora of options for using our phones in different ways.
Why The Phone Is Personal
The phone really started to become personal when we started inserting our personality through Apps and data on to these devices. Communities exist and thrive on users showing off how they personalized their home screens.
Phones also became personal when they started inserting themselves in to our loves more. Out of all the devices we interact with throughout the day, the smartphone is the only one we take with us wherever we go and the one we touch the most. We probably hold our smart phones more than our significant other’s hand throughout the day. It may even be the first thing you wake up to and the last thing you see before you shut your eyes. We rely on it for directions to places we want to go, reviews of things we’re unsure of and for communicating with others.
The smartphone is here to stay and it’s perhaps the most personal device we’ve ever used.
Sent from my iPhone.
