Where We Were Yesteryear

Smartphone is the buzzword right now, but do you remember some of the original popular Nokia phones? Or when Motorola took the world by storm with their RAZR phones? I do. I remember being the same person I am now, constantly upgrading my phone to the latest and greatest and back then it was all in the phone - there were no application stores or Wi-Fi on your handset.

4G was a pipe dream, heck so was 3G. Bluetooth was around the corner, and Retina displays were probably a wet dream of the late Steve Jobs. Those days saw huge companies such as Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and more dominate. These companies were making so many phones, and even more money and the market was happy.

Consumers were happy, as most of phone purchases in the beginning were from corporate clients, but the consumer wasn't quite ready to plonk down $900 for a phone, nor did they want to jump on an $80-per-month contract for a device to just call their friends and family occasionally. The market could not have survived an iPhone, or the iPhone would not have survived the market. There needed to be a slow change in companies, consumers, and the middle ground - where virtually everything else lays - app stores, Internet access, and more.

If you remember back to iconic handsets like the Nokia 3210, or 3310, each phone had its specific killer-feature, and you would buy it because it did X over your phone which only did Y. Flip phone when you had a brick? Yes sir. Color screen when you had nothing else? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

These days were filled with small, incremental updates, but it took a while for technology to shrink down to the point of mass production - but even then, the market and consumers weren't ready. In this day, desktop PCs and cumbersome notebooks were used on dial-up connections to access the Internet. If you wanted to check out a website, you'd sit in front of your computer and visit it. There were no social networks, or Angry Birds to fling at pigs. These days were simple - and it made you have a device for your specific application.

A phone for actual phone calls, and a computer for computing. As the Internet became intertwined with virtually every faction of our lives, technology began to slowly seep into our skin - kind of like how Spiderman had the black goo slide onto him and take him over in the Spiderman 3 - this is what has happened to all of us, except we don't all realize that it's bad because we're all in love with our technology.

As with everything else, the market changes, consumers change, and new generations of citizens come along who want everything faster, smaller, thinner, better looking - the list goes on and on. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the iPhone was released. It. Changed. Everything.

We all know it did, because look at where we are today...