A list of gadgets killed by the iPhone from Wired: (Can you think of any more?)
Link to Article.
The PDA
Remember the PDA? Right back to the Psion Organizer in 1984 (above), the PDA has essentially been an electronic calendar, address book and notepad. And right back to the Psion, with its squishy, non-QWERTY keyboard, they've been harder to use than their paper equivalents.
Still, despite this, it took the cellphone to finally kill them off. The fatal shortcoming? The address book. Who on earth would take out their PDA, call up a contact and then tap the phone number into their phone? Nobody, which is why, as the calendaring functions of phones got better, the PDA was quietly retired.
The Camera
We're not saying that the standalone camera is dead. Far from it — one look in the street will show you how popular is the modern DSLR. But for people below a certain age, the camera phone is the one they use, and it has already killed off the cheap, junky bottom end of the digicam market. It's easy to see why: Although the pictures from the small sensors might not be great, the camera phone is always in your pocket, and you can snap and send pictures over the network in seconds.
This convenience more than makes up for the noisy pictures. Remember the saying: The best camera is the one you have with you.
The UMPC
The Ultra Mobile PC was a failed experiment, although once in while a company will drag the rotting corpse from its comfortable grave, slap on a bit of makeup and try to sell the idea again. The reason? Cellphones. Think about it: The UMPC was a full-fledged computer crammed into a tiny box with an impossible-to-use keyboard, with pathetic battery life and a hilariously high price tag. The phone, in contrast, offers an operating system and interface designed for the modest hardware on which it will run. It's cheap, and the battery lasts for days.
Better still, phones are only getting more powerful. The iPhone and the G1 are both handheld computers which happen to have a phone attached. And if you really do need a bigger screen, you can pick up two or three netbooks for the price of one UMPC.
The Phone
Hands up who still has a home land line with a telephone attached? Now, keep your arm in the air if you ever make calls on it. We don't see many hands.
We still keep these old tethered phones around, for calling the emergency services if nothing else, or because its cheaper to buy an all-in-one package from the local telco. But the main phone for many people is the cellphone. Part of this is the convenience of always having it with you, even in the house.
But we think a bigger part is that the humble telephone just hasn't kept up with technology. The handsets just don't have the features we're used to. And when we do use a land line, we look up the number on our cellphone and then type it in. Small wonder that most people just press the green button on the mobile instead.
The MP3 Player
Almost every phone comes with an MP3 player. We guess that in a few years, even the iPod will be dead, replaced entirely by the iPhone (and the iPod Touch, which is really just a cellphone without a phone). Music playback and a headphone jack is now a standard feature on even the cheapest of handsets (with some notable exceptions). Our prediction? The MP3 player will join the PDA in the gadget graveyard within a few short years.
Next: The Notebook
It will take some time, but it's easy to imagine the cellphone completely replacing the laptop for mobile use. Sure, we might keep one at home for work, but the cellphone already does most of what our notebooks do. We can listen to music, play movies and use the internet. One day, those big old, battery-sucking computers will be an amusing relic.
Ironically, these future phones might be lacking the one thing that gave them their name — a phone. When fast data connections are ubiquitous, voice traffic will inevitably be sent over the internet.
The Pager
The most popular suggestion was the pager.
5 gadgets? How could you forget the ubiquitous pager? In the not too distant past no drug dealer would leave home without it. The pager was the number one casualty of the rise of the cellphone. – Lenny
I couldn't put it better, Lenny. The beeper was indeed killed by the mobile, and rightly so: Not only were you always on call, you had to find a payphone in order to ring back, and you had to pay for it.
It offered some advantages, though -- doctors could go out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and be called off to work just after ordering (every medical drama made in the 1990s) and, on the other side, patients awaiting transplants could be tipped-off the moment the organs were in stock. All in all, though, a text message is a lot quicker and easier.
The Wristwatch
I still wear a wristwatch, although more as jewelry than as a time-telling tool. In fact, judging by the number of unusable watches our own Danny Dumas buys from Tokyo Flash, it's probably safe to say that watches don't even need to tell the time anymore. The cellphone may not have killed the watch, but it has certainly made it less essential. That hasn't stopped the likes of Vertu trying to hawk overpriced "luxury" cellphones to the same people that buy Rolexes.
Pocket Calculator
I got a surprising amount of suggestions for this one, and I actually considered putting it on yesterday's list. But although the cellphone will add, subtract and everything else, the keypad just isn't up to the task.
Anyone who adds up in a professional capacity (accountants, bar managers, shop owners) will always prefer a big, solid desktop calculator. Those things are accurate, and above all, fast. You try tapping $100,000 worth of receipts into a cellphone and see how long it is before you throw the thing out the window.
Alarm Clocks
True. Although an iPod also makes a pretty good alarm clock, and it doesn't irradiate your head as you sleep.
SatNav
Another great suggestion. GPS is finding its way into more and more phones, and even those that don't have it can guesstimate your position using cell-tower triangulation. The problem is that many phones need a network connection to actually pull down a map, whereas standalone SatNav devices store everything on-board and only need to connect to the satellite.
This means that a phone makes a pretty bad GPS device when you are out in the wilds -- arguably where you need it most.
Books
Here at Gadget Lab, we're fans of reading books on the iPhone, but we still don't think the book is anywhere near dead. For starters, the screens on cellphones just don't cut it as e-readers (although the iPhone gets close with a decent size and high 163ppi resolution). Heck, even purpose-built e-readers aren't there yet.
One day, though, the dead tree version will be obsolete, but we give it some years yet. The irony? Tiny text files are perfectly suited to small, low power devices.
Handheld Consoles
Will the phone kill the Gameboy? Perhaps. Nokia tried it with the taco-shaped N-Gage and failed. Apple is trying with the iPhone, and doing OK. But in the US the Nintendo DS is the second best selling console for October, beaten only by the Wii. Nintendo is shifting around half a million of them every month. That doesn't sound like a dead market.
What's certain is that the cellphone is becoming the default device for more and more things, slurping up other gadgets like a a giant Katamari Damacy ball. It might not be the best tool for a given job, but it's certainly the most convenient.
*The best hate mail was this one:
(You are so full of s**t that I hope they do not pay you to write your dribble and some [...] Gandpa [sic] my ass----who are you a young punk who cannot get a job except for writing???
Link to Article.
The PDA
Remember the PDA? Right back to the Psion Organizer in 1984 (above), the PDA has essentially been an electronic calendar, address book and notepad. And right back to the Psion, with its squishy, non-QWERTY keyboard, they've been harder to use than their paper equivalents.
Still, despite this, it took the cellphone to finally kill them off. The fatal shortcoming? The address book. Who on earth would take out their PDA, call up a contact and then tap the phone number into their phone? Nobody, which is why, as the calendaring functions of phones got better, the PDA was quietly retired.
The Camera
We're not saying that the standalone camera is dead. Far from it — one look in the street will show you how popular is the modern DSLR. But for people below a certain age, the camera phone is the one they use, and it has already killed off the cheap, junky bottom end of the digicam market. It's easy to see why: Although the pictures from the small sensors might not be great, the camera phone is always in your pocket, and you can snap and send pictures over the network in seconds.
This convenience more than makes up for the noisy pictures. Remember the saying: The best camera is the one you have with you.
The UMPC
The Ultra Mobile PC was a failed experiment, although once in while a company will drag the rotting corpse from its comfortable grave, slap on a bit of makeup and try to sell the idea again. The reason? Cellphones. Think about it: The UMPC was a full-fledged computer crammed into a tiny box with an impossible-to-use keyboard, with pathetic battery life and a hilariously high price tag. The phone, in contrast, offers an operating system and interface designed for the modest hardware on which it will run. It's cheap, and the battery lasts for days.
Better still, phones are only getting more powerful. The iPhone and the G1 are both handheld computers which happen to have a phone attached. And if you really do need a bigger screen, you can pick up two or three netbooks for the price of one UMPC.
The Phone
Hands up who still has a home land line with a telephone attached? Now, keep your arm in the air if you ever make calls on it. We don't see many hands.
We still keep these old tethered phones around, for calling the emergency services if nothing else, or because its cheaper to buy an all-in-one package from the local telco. But the main phone for many people is the cellphone. Part of this is the convenience of always having it with you, even in the house.
But we think a bigger part is that the humble telephone just hasn't kept up with technology. The handsets just don't have the features we're used to. And when we do use a land line, we look up the number on our cellphone and then type it in. Small wonder that most people just press the green button on the mobile instead.
The MP3 Player
Almost every phone comes with an MP3 player. We guess that in a few years, even the iPod will be dead, replaced entirely by the iPhone (and the iPod Touch, which is really just a cellphone without a phone). Music playback and a headphone jack is now a standard feature on even the cheapest of handsets (with some notable exceptions). Our prediction? The MP3 player will join the PDA in the gadget graveyard within a few short years.
Next: The Notebook
It will take some time, but it's easy to imagine the cellphone completely replacing the laptop for mobile use. Sure, we might keep one at home for work, but the cellphone already does most of what our notebooks do. We can listen to music, play movies and use the internet. One day, those big old, battery-sucking computers will be an amusing relic.
Ironically, these future phones might be lacking the one thing that gave them their name — a phone. When fast data connections are ubiquitous, voice traffic will inevitably be sent over the internet.
The Pager
The most popular suggestion was the pager.
5 gadgets? How could you forget the ubiquitous pager? In the not too distant past no drug dealer would leave home without it. The pager was the number one casualty of the rise of the cellphone. – Lenny
I couldn't put it better, Lenny. The beeper was indeed killed by the mobile, and rightly so: Not only were you always on call, you had to find a payphone in order to ring back, and you had to pay for it.
It offered some advantages, though -- doctors could go out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and be called off to work just after ordering (every medical drama made in the 1990s) and, on the other side, patients awaiting transplants could be tipped-off the moment the organs were in stock. All in all, though, a text message is a lot quicker and easier.
The Wristwatch
I still wear a wristwatch, although more as jewelry than as a time-telling tool. In fact, judging by the number of unusable watches our own Danny Dumas buys from Tokyo Flash, it's probably safe to say that watches don't even need to tell the time anymore. The cellphone may not have killed the watch, but it has certainly made it less essential. That hasn't stopped the likes of Vertu trying to hawk overpriced "luxury" cellphones to the same people that buy Rolexes.
Pocket Calculator
I got a surprising amount of suggestions for this one, and I actually considered putting it on yesterday's list. But although the cellphone will add, subtract and everything else, the keypad just isn't up to the task.
Anyone who adds up in a professional capacity (accountants, bar managers, shop owners) will always prefer a big, solid desktop calculator. Those things are accurate, and above all, fast. You try tapping $100,000 worth of receipts into a cellphone and see how long it is before you throw the thing out the window.
Alarm Clocks
True. Although an iPod also makes a pretty good alarm clock, and it doesn't irradiate your head as you sleep.
SatNav
Another great suggestion. GPS is finding its way into more and more phones, and even those that don't have it can guesstimate your position using cell-tower triangulation. The problem is that many phones need a network connection to actually pull down a map, whereas standalone SatNav devices store everything on-board and only need to connect to the satellite.
This means that a phone makes a pretty bad GPS device when you are out in the wilds -- arguably where you need it most.
Books
Here at Gadget Lab, we're fans of reading books on the iPhone, but we still don't think the book is anywhere near dead. For starters, the screens on cellphones just don't cut it as e-readers (although the iPhone gets close with a decent size and high 163ppi resolution). Heck, even purpose-built e-readers aren't there yet.
One day, though, the dead tree version will be obsolete, but we give it some years yet. The irony? Tiny text files are perfectly suited to small, low power devices.
Handheld Consoles
Will the phone kill the Gameboy? Perhaps. Nokia tried it with the taco-shaped N-Gage and failed. Apple is trying with the iPhone, and doing OK. But in the US the Nintendo DS is the second best selling console for October, beaten only by the Wii. Nintendo is shifting around half a million of them every month. That doesn't sound like a dead market.
What's certain is that the cellphone is becoming the default device for more and more things, slurping up other gadgets like a a giant Katamari Damacy ball. It might not be the best tool for a given job, but it's certainly the most convenient.
*The best hate mail was this one:
(You are so full of s**t that I hope they do not pay you to write your dribble and some [...] Gandpa [sic] my ass----who are you a young punk who cannot get a job except for writing???
