How Smartphones Took Over the World
Development of the First Smartphone: the iPhone
Smartphones are phones that have added functionality such as mp3 players, GPS, or other applications. In the fall of 2006, Steve Jobs had a meeting with 200 of his companies top engineers to demo the new iPhone. It was distarous as the battery life was terrible, the applications were breaking, and it dropped calls constantly. (Vogelstein) They had very little time as Macworld, a convention in which Steve Jobs would use to launch his new products, was only three months away and Apple had no other products set to be released. The 200 or so engineers began the process of fixing the iPhone's problems. For the people who were working on the iPhone, the following months would be hellish as they had a limited time window to fix it. By the end just a few weeks before the convention was set to take place, Steve Jobs was able to show a prototype to his project partners at AT&T. He showed off the iPhone's various features: its screen, its powerful Web browser, and it user interface. (Vogelstein) On June 29,2007 the iPhone was released to the public and it was expected to be sold to a record amount and Apple would make massive profits on the phone itself and the contract the customers signed. The change in how people viewed phones were drastically changed with the release of this product as people began to realize that they were no longer carrying around a cell phone in their pocket but a small computer in their pockets. It not only changed our communication rather it changed our society. We suddenly were tied to our to phone and we began to hate the fact that we were tied to work by a phone. Furthermore with the additional messaging services that Apple had implemented, the communication language was impacted as people began to shorten their words and create a new texting language. This caused fears by teachers and adults that students were ruining their own knowledge of the English language and speaking from experience I noticed the drop in my spelling because of the auto correct feature that was available. No longer did I have to know how to spell those really long words as I would only have to get close and suddenly my phone would correct me. If we continue down this path of communicating via shortened words the likelihood is that the younger generations will have a worse grasp of the English language.
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The video to the right is a video that shows the unveiling of the first iPhone at the Macworld. As I mentioned above this product was the first true smartphone that changed the way people thought of phones and how they were developed.
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