From Motorola’s invention of the cell phone to the innovations of Apple and Google, smartphones have deeply penetrated modern life and society. Advancements in operating systems and hardware, as well as the emergence of chat apps and social media, have changed the way we communicate and greatly improved our lives through mobile work and information sharing.
Smartphones are one of the major inventions of the 21st century, and they are already deeply embedded in our society. In this article, we’ll focus on how smartphones came to be and how they’ve impacted society since their introduction.
As the name suggests, a smartphone is a device whose primary function is to make phone calls. In 1973, Motorola, an American telecommunications company, introduced the first cell phone that could be held in one hand, and over the next 20 to 30 years, in economically developed countries, everyone had their own cell phone. In 2003, the year of the smartphone, personal computers were already widely available, but people wanted a computer that they could take with them everywhere. At that time, the penetration rate of cell phones in Korea was over 60%, so the idea of combining a computer with a cell phone that they carried with them all the time was something that anyone could come up with.
Even before 2003, there were attempts to bring the concept of computers to cell phones, such as PDAs and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which are similar to the current smartphone. However, there were only a few companies that innovated and introduced the world to the new realm of electronics: Google and Apple. We usually categorize smartphones based on their operating system (OS). An operating system is a program that converts electrical signals into human-understandable graphics or text and enables various essential functions when the machine called a smartphone operates in the language of the machine. An example of a computer is Microsoft’s Windows series or Apple’s Macintosh. Since smartphones are also a type of computer, an operating system is essential, and many companies tried to capture this market in the early days of smartphones.
Android, a Silicon Valley tech company, was initially intended to be an operating system for digital cameras. However, the developers realized that the market for digital cameras wasn’t as big as they thought it was, so they changed course and focused on operating systems for new mobile devices. At this point, smartphones as we know them today didn’t exist, and thanks to their choice to be ahead of their time, Android was able to dominate the smartphone operating system market. Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for them. The smartphone operating system was perfected, but the smartphones themselves arrived later, and the time gap was not enough to keep Android afloat and the company fell into financial difficulties. Google acquired the company, and Android became the operating system of choice for many smartphone manufacturers, thanks to its high compatibility.
Apple is the creator of iOS, which ranks second in the operating system market with an 11.7% share as of 2016 and has a loyal following of consumers. iOS is the result of a collaboration between the developers of Apple’s mp3 player, the iPod, and the developers of Apple’s computer operating system, the Macintosh, based on their experience with the success of the Macintosh. Created exclusively for the iPhone, Apple’s smartphone series, iOS emphasized building its own ecosystem over compatibility and emphasizing simplicity in the design and organization of the operating system, such as sleekness. By appealing to this emotional aspect of consumers, the iPhone has gained a solid base of support.
If the operating system, which is the software of a smartphone, has the above background, the development of the hardware part has a rather turbulent background. The main components of a smartphone are DRAM, CPU, display, and battery, and the secondary components are cameras, Bluetooth, etc. DRAM is the amount of memory a computer can hold at one time. Apart from storage devices like SSDs, it refers to how much your smartphone can run at once while it’s running. The larger the capacity of DRAM, the easier it is to run heavier programs and applications, such as video players or games. Advances in DRAM technology are tied to nanotechnology, which determines how much storage can be packed into a chip that’s smaller than the palm of your hand. Currently, DRAMs in widespread use have capacities ranging from 2GB to 8GB. This level of performance was unimaginable just a decade ago. DRAM has come a long way in 10 years, increasing in capacity by about 1,000 times and in speed by about 200 times, which means that simple math tells us that if we had a smartphone with the same performance 10 years ago, it would have had to have DRAM that was 1,000 times larger in physical size than it is today. DRAM is still evolving to increase its capacity and speed up processing.
In the case of displays, LEDs have become the core technology, with a focus on producing cleaner, more natural colors. The size of the screen has gradually increased, finding a sweet spot at around 5 inches, a size that can be held in one hand. Once this size was established, unique displays began to emerge. Examples include Samsung’s Galaxy Edge, a curved display that covers the sides of the phone, and Xiaomi’s Mi Mix, which does away with the surrounding borders and fills the entire front of the phone with the display. The battery is another important component. Almost all smartphones use lithium-ion batteries, but the problem with this type of battery is that it doesn’t have a very high capacity. Today’s smartphones use a lot of energy to keep their screens bright and run programs. Even if they’re powerful enough, they’re useless without power. Unlike a computer that sits at a desk, smartphones need to be charged from time to time, so the longer the charging interval, the more desirable it is to consumers. However, this is a problem that is unlikely to be solved without a revolutionary change in battery technology, so users are working around it with power banks. Fuel cells are being researched as the next generation of batteries, but they are not yet commercially available.
This is a brief overview of the software, the operating system, and the hardware of a smartphone. Next, let’s take a look at how smartphones have been integrated into our lives. We’ve already seen some changes in the cell phone era. From alarms waking people up early in the morning to calling or texting people far away to stay in touch. In the 2000s, cell phones added camera capabilities and people started using their phones to capture moments of their lives in photos and videos. However, before smartphones, it was very “expensive” to share your photos with others, and the photos that were shared were low-resolution and didn’t convey the same raw feeling that the person who took the photo experienced. However, this has changed dramatically since the advent of camera technology and smartphones. Smartphones with large storage capacities and high-definition cameras have enabled people to take high-resolution photos and videos at will, and share them with others through two applications: chat apps and social media.
Traditional cell phone users used “text messaging” as a simple way to communicate. The 80-character limit and the fact that you can only send text unless you pay for additional charges were completely eliminated with the advent of chat apps on smartphones. People could share their thoughts to their heart’s content without being restricted by character limits. Because of these advantages, users began to use chat apps such as KakaoTalk and Line instead of texting, and their dependence on these apps was indirectly demonstrated by the recent September earthquake in Gyeongju. On the day of the earthquake, the average number of KakaoTalk messages sent per day exceeded 3 billion, reaching 8 billion, and a server problem that couldn’t handle the increased data transfer led to an outage that prevented KakaoTalk from sending messages for about two hours. This incident alone showed how close people are to using chat apps on a daily basis.
Next came the rise of SNS, which completely changed the way people communicate online. SNS, also known as social networking sites, are not just apps, but a new system brought about by the smartphone market. There are many different types of SNS, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and more, but they all have one thing in common: connecting people. When you “follow” someone on social media, you receive real-time information such as posts and photos from them. If you react to this information by liking or otherwise interacting with it, it’s passed on to those who follow you back. In this web-like social network, information posted by one person is quickly shared by many. In concrete terms, a post that is liked by 1000 people can reach as many as 50,000 people. This new way of communicating has opened up a much larger market for community sites that used to simply share personal life.
The role of smartphones in social media is that it’s now possible to share information anytime, anywhere. For example, if someone eats at a good restaurant and shares his or her experience on social media, dozens or even hundreds of people in the immediate vicinity will see the post, and some of them may even find the restaurant. If that person also likes the restaurant, the cycle will repeat itself, and more people will know about the restaurant. There are countless examples of businesses that have been very successful because of this, meaning that “word of mouth”, which used to be passed from mouth to mouth, can be done on people’s thumbs without having to go through their mouths. This is much faster than the traditional way of spreading rumors and has a huge impact.
This has huge political implications. If you look at the current US presidential election, one of the ways to survey public opinion is to analyze big data based on social media. In the pre-smartphone era, people would have had to sit at home at their computers and type on their keyboards to express their political opinions online, but the combination of smartphones and social media has allowed people to instantly react to political events anytime, anywhere. It’s clear that some people have abused this advantage, undermining the net function of social media. There are also unfair practices such as intentionally displaying advertisements for companies that have paid for them by systematically operating ‘like’ factories using smartphones, and there are various rumors on social media.
On the other hand, smartphones have made it possible to perform tasks that were previously done on PCs at home or in the office on the bus or subway. These devices, which can be thought of as tiny computers, allow people to bank whenever they want, without having to travel to a bank or sit in front of a computer. Recently, there has been a growing trend among young people to use Dutch Pay, which allows one person to pay for multiple people and then send the money to the other person after they have paid. This is possible thanks to the banking apps on smartphones or specialized apps for microtransactions like Toss. Smartphones have also enabled workers to be more responsive to their work, as they have started to support PDF and HWP files that were previously only available on computers, allowing them to continue working on their smartphones before they arrive at work or even after they leave the office. However, this phenomenon is a double-edged sword, as it has also created a structure where modern people cannot be free from work forever. A new social problem has emerged in which employees’ freedom from work is disappearing because their bosses are constantly asking them to work through company group chat rooms on Messenger.
The downside of this is that modern people’s daily lives have become connected to a huge internet network, and it is difficult to guarantee personal freedom unless they intentionally block it. However, if you had to choose between a world without smartphones and a world with smartphones, most people would definitely choose the latter. There’s no denying that smartphones have brought many benefits to our lives, and they are undoubtedly the dawn of the information age. The negative side effects of smartphones can be solved if society can come to a consensus on how to deal with them.
