Cast your mind back to a time before smart phones. The world was a subtly different place. Where mobile phones changed the way we communicated in a starkly noticeable way – remember that the sight of someone taking a call in a cafe was all but unheard of just 20 years ago – smart phones and tablets have affected less immediately obvious but often equally significant changes in the way we live our lives. They’ve oiled the cogs in the rustier parts of our social machinery.Communication shake-up
The way in which the advent of mobiles and the rise of text messaging altered the way we communicate with each other was totally unprecedented, and the change we’ve seen in the jump from ordinary cell phones to smart phones and tablets has also been extraordinarily considerable. The key change has been the integration of online communications with telecommunications. Where once a phone was a phone and a computer was a computer, the lines are now significantly blurred (it works the other way round too – just look at Skype).
We can now access our emails, social network feeds and other online communications through smart phone and tablet-based browsers and apps, meaning it’s now easier than ever to contact whoever you want, wherever you are. Unfortunately, this also means that it’s easier than ever for employers or clients to contact you whilst you’re on holiday…
Playing with your phone
Playing with phones is nothing new – ever since the magnificently simple Snake awakened us to the potential for hand-held gaming fun on our mobiles we’ve been slowly immersing ourselves into the mobile gaming world.
Only since the advent of smart phones and tabs however, has this mode of gaming proven its true, vast potential. Games such as Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja have become massive commercial successes, flying off the app store shelves and commercially outperforming some of their high budget console-based equivalents. Puzzle and casino gaming have emerged as key genres in the mobile and tablet gaming market, with puzzlers like Bejewelled catching on like wildfire and casino sites like Real Money Gambling Apps developing ever stronger gaming products – check it out here!
Smart phones and tablets now incorporate our diaries, our leisure pursuits, our maps, notebooks and compasses. They’re our jukeboxes, our address books and internet browsers. To consider how much of your life is now crammed on to your phone is to realise that we’re living through a smart phone and tablet revolution!
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