So still technically being Thursday when I started I was watching the latest Isaac Arthur video, in this case mind machine interfaces, which was as usual a fascinating discussion but it had a throwaway line of "if you remember a time before cellphones" (or mobile phones if you speak proper).
It occurred then that this might be the case for some people. I am old enough to remember the first ones being things only rich businessmen or people that absolutely needed to be contacted would have installed in cars (batteries of the day were not really something you could put in a pocket unless said pocket was the side of a laptop bag and you were wearing both belt and braces).
Fast forward a few years into the early 1990s and there were options for mere mortals, however they would come with a credit check and represent a serious expense that one had to consider (to say nothing on the cost to the caller in the UK -- unlike the US the UK has a different band of numbers for mobile phones). Their functionality was fairly minimal (snake was a few years yet, or if you prefer go see the final sequence in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for a pretty accurate representation of matters then*) and battery lives usually meant "the person you are calling has their phone switched off" was something you heard a lot.
Around the time of snake then they started to be remarkably common in schools. UK wise this would probably also be around the time "pay as you go" (prepaid in US parlance) things became viable for many. It would also be the around the time "WAP" internet... I can't say rose up but the less said about that concept the better. I would like to find out when "don't bring your phone into school" became "don't have your phone disrupt lessons" but I am not that invested in the concept.
Some point not long after that I remember adding several gigabytes (a considerable amount of space at the time) of maps of the UK to a mobile phone with a reasonable screen to also function as a GPS (in this case the person in question liked hill walking) -- some thing the likes of apple invented the "smart phone" and even if we disregard palmtop computers this is very much not the case, though if you were in the US with its horribly backwards phones then it might feel that way. Apple might have been the first to properly commit to some kind of openness that mattered but that is also getting ahead of things. Around the same time we also saw the rise of phone games (a good term of categorisation and also a search term would be J2ME), usually obtained by calling expensive phone lines (which made enough to continuously advertise on the likes of MTV back during the height of the Jackass era).
So anyway Apple dropped the first to really bring the idea of applications (HP's earlier efforts were way too locked down for most people, and blackberry weren't doing much either). I am not sure when this first really took hold but if January 2009 saw one of the finest pieces of DS homebrew have its iphone port (said port then being the primary focus, to the point where the DS homebrew effort was all but stripped and then eventually stripped from the website) be noted in Eurogamer then I can't say it happened any later. If you were to attempt to argue for a later date then I would probably look at when websites absolutely needed to have mobile versions and not just stuff such people onto the print/no CSS edition.
Android dropped fairly shortly afterwards and the rest is history (read I want to spare a rant on the lack of replaceable batteries and lack of SD card slots), give or take my wanting to note Microsoft essentially admitted to abandoning Windows phone about this time in 2017. though it was probably more like 2014 when it became a dead OS walking.
I think I first met people that moved wholly from landlines to mobile phones in 2010 but have heard of earlier, today "oh we have a phone line but only use it for internet and have never even have a landline plugged in" is common.
*another choice one would be that TV show Heroes and their product placement there. I did particularly want to find the scene where they all got new phones but searching for articles on product placement in that show saw me learn people turned it into a drinking game that would likely kill you.
If my 2009 date is then the latest date things went wide it should also be noted that is the better part of 11 years at this point. If people don't have too many coherent memories of life before about 5 years old then said 5 year olds (judging by the buggies I see around about today then said 5 year olds might even have their own phone) are now approaching 16, a point where in many counties they can operate vehicles and are quite possibly deciding the course of much of the rest of their lives. If it was the 2003 date of the likes of Snake and earliest J2ME efforts then that does not make a harder to sell case that phones are a new invention -- said hypothetical 5 year old is now 21. At the same time many of these things are a slow crawl so some things may have snuck up on you.
In my case I have tried never to have a phone, and even those few weeks where I have been compelled to have one (the last one being one week in 2013 according to my accounts) I left it on the table on charge as a landline in all but name. No particular philosophical reason for this, and it is mainly as I am a cheap bastard that refuses to pay for data that expires at the end of the month. To that end I tend not to treat them as a tool I have at my disposal and maybe part of the reason that statement I mentioned at the start (and titled the thread with) caused me to pause.
While I am mainly after a discussion around the matter if we do need some framing questions then
Are you someone that has grown up essentially always knowing them? Maybe you got to witness the transition periods above (or even the US dark ages of such things) and if so what are your memories of that periods? Are you also an old bastard? Did the idea that significant numbers of people have never not known a world with such things surprise you at some level?
It occurred then that this might be the case for some people. I am old enough to remember the first ones being things only rich businessmen or people that absolutely needed to be contacted would have installed in cars (batteries of the day were not really something you could put in a pocket unless said pocket was the side of a laptop bag and you were wearing both belt and braces).
Fast forward a few years into the early 1990s and there were options for mere mortals, however they would come with a credit check and represent a serious expense that one had to consider (to say nothing on the cost to the caller in the UK -- unlike the US the UK has a different band of numbers for mobile phones). Their functionality was fairly minimal (snake was a few years yet, or if you prefer go see the final sequence in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for a pretty accurate representation of matters then*) and battery lives usually meant "the person you are calling has their phone switched off" was something you heard a lot.
Around the time of snake then they started to be remarkably common in schools. UK wise this would probably also be around the time "pay as you go" (prepaid in US parlance) things became viable for many. It would also be the around the time "WAP" internet... I can't say rose up but the less said about that concept the better. I would like to find out when "don't bring your phone into school" became "don't have your phone disrupt lessons" but I am not that invested in the concept.
Some point not long after that I remember adding several gigabytes (a considerable amount of space at the time) of maps of the UK to a mobile phone with a reasonable screen to also function as a GPS (in this case the person in question liked hill walking) -- some thing the likes of apple invented the "smart phone" and even if we disregard palmtop computers this is very much not the case, though if you were in the US with its horribly backwards phones then it might feel that way. Apple might have been the first to properly commit to some kind of openness that mattered but that is also getting ahead of things. Around the same time we also saw the rise of phone games (a good term of categorisation and also a search term would be J2ME), usually obtained by calling expensive phone lines (which made enough to continuously advertise on the likes of MTV back during the height of the Jackass era).
So anyway Apple dropped the first to really bring the idea of applications (HP's earlier efforts were way too locked down for most people, and blackberry weren't doing much either). I am not sure when this first really took hold but if January 2009 saw one of the finest pieces of DS homebrew have its iphone port (said port then being the primary focus, to the point where the DS homebrew effort was all but stripped and then eventually stripped from the website) be noted in Eurogamer then I can't say it happened any later. If you were to attempt to argue for a later date then I would probably look at when websites absolutely needed to have mobile versions and not just stuff such people onto the print/no CSS edition.
Android dropped fairly shortly afterwards and the rest is history (read I want to spare a rant on the lack of replaceable batteries and lack of SD card slots), give or take my wanting to note Microsoft essentially admitted to abandoning Windows phone about this time in 2017. though it was probably more like 2014 when it became a dead OS walking.
I think I first met people that moved wholly from landlines to mobile phones in 2010 but have heard of earlier, today "oh we have a phone line but only use it for internet and have never even have a landline plugged in" is common.
*another choice one would be that TV show Heroes and their product placement there. I did particularly want to find the scene where they all got new phones but searching for articles on product placement in that show saw me learn people turned it into a drinking game that would likely kill you.
If my 2009 date is then the latest date things went wide it should also be noted that is the better part of 11 years at this point. If people don't have too many coherent memories of life before about 5 years old then said 5 year olds (judging by the buggies I see around about today then said 5 year olds might even have their own phone) are now approaching 16, a point where in many counties they can operate vehicles and are quite possibly deciding the course of much of the rest of their lives. If it was the 2003 date of the likes of Snake and earliest J2ME efforts then that does not make a harder to sell case that phones are a new invention -- said hypothetical 5 year old is now 21. At the same time many of these things are a slow crawl so some things may have snuck up on you.
In my case I have tried never to have a phone, and even those few weeks where I have been compelled to have one (the last one being one week in 2013 according to my accounts) I left it on the table on charge as a landline in all but name. No particular philosophical reason for this, and it is mainly as I am a cheap bastard that refuses to pay for data that expires at the end of the month. To that end I tend not to treat them as a tool I have at my disposal and maybe part of the reason that statement I mentioned at the start (and titled the thread with) caused me to pause.
While I am mainly after a discussion around the matter if we do need some framing questions then
Are you someone that has grown up essentially always knowing them? Maybe you got to witness the transition periods above (or even the US dark ages of such things) and if so what are your memories of that periods? Are you also an old bastard? Did the idea that significant numbers of people have never not known a world with such things surprise you at some level?