Culturebox: The Future of Mobile Gadgets

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future of innovation The Future of Mobile Gadgets How many will we carry? What will they look like? What will they do? By Farhad Manjoo Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011, at 6:36 PM ET I got my first cell phone a little more than a decade ago, just as I was finishing college and looking for my first job. I didn't need a mobile phone; none of my friends had them, and I was pretty sure they'd all mock me for getting one. (They did.) At the time, there was still something ostentatious and vaguely shady about mobile communications devices. There seemed to be only a handful of reasons why someone would need to carry a phone or a pager at all times: a) You were a doctor; b) you were a drug dealer; and/or c) you were a self-important schmuck. Neither a) nor b) applied in my case. I wanted a cell phone because I like gadgets. If you pressed me on it, I might have pointed out that Europeans and Asians were flocking to mobile phones, so it seemed likely that Americans would soon, too. But mostly I wanted a cell phone because it seemed cool to be able to call people from anywhere. In other words, c). I wasn't alone. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of American mobile phone subscribers jumped from 55 million to 141 million. What happened? Sure, technology was part of the story. Cell phones kept getting smaller, cheaper, and better; by the turn of the century they offered good enough coverage and call quality that you could use them pretty much anywhere. But all gadgets keep getting better--and even if they were cheaper than before, getting a cell phone typically required a commitment of at least several hundred dollars a year, so it was by no means cheap. Why did nearly everyone suddenly decide that mobile phones were worth this cost? The big reason, I think, was the network effect. As more people got cell phones, cell phones became more useful--there were more people to call, more people to text, and more people who began to assume that you, too, had a cell phone. At some point there were enough mobile phones that the cultural attitudes about the device flipped. People stopped thinking you were a self-important schmuck if you carried a mobile phone. You were a self-important schmuck if you didn't. To continue reading, click here. Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at farhad.manjoo@slate.com and follow him on Twitter. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Why Didn't the Senate Ask Gen. Petraeus a Single Hard Question About Afghanistan? What the Leaked Bank of America Documents Reveal About the Bank's Lending Practices Shafer: In Defense of Gilbert Gottfried and His Tasteless Jokes	Advertisement
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