William Gibson (via Kevin Kelly) talks about steam engine time – the point at which all the pieces come together to make steam engines a thing. You might have the technology, you might have the need, you might have the necessary infrastructure to make it cost-efficient and a viable business model – but until you get it all together, it’s not steam-engine time.
Thinking about the number of leaps it took to get to the modern world of mobility computing made me think of this. It takes a lot to get us to “superphone time.” Not smartphone time, which arguably began with the Sidekick, but superphone in that one device is replacing everything. Here’s what it took, measuring from my first cellphone in 1997:
1) Cellular data service. First obtained by me in 2000, not really mainstream until about 2002, and arguably not really competitive with Wi-Fi or wired data speeds until the coming of large-scale LTE deployment in 2011-12. Along with this, you need text messaging to become a thing, which doesn’t really happen in the United States until around 2004 or so.
2) A high-resolution display and a snappy processor, plus an operating system powerful enough to drive them (and run other programs besides) yet light enough to fit in limited memory. PalmOS had a lot of this by 1998 or so, in a very primitive form – the Handspring Visor and the Treo that followed it were painfully gimped compared to a modern phone, but you had an OS that could run third-party applications and manage a wireless data connection by 2000 or so. After that, it just took Moore’s Law to get a sufficiently capable combination
3) Digital media and the ability to purchase and use it as a mainstream means of consumption. Arguably not a thing until the launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, which marked the point at which major labels were willing to accept that downloaded music was their future. Even though MP3 had been a thing for years prior (I first heard of CD ripping in 1997) you don’t get to superphone time until music companies are willing to sell you everything in bits instead of atoms.
4) Broadly pervasive and free Wi-Fi, sufficient to offload the bulk of data burden from your cell connection, which only started to get outside Silicon Valley by 2002 or so.
4) Lithium-polymer battery life capable of running the aforementioned high-resolution display, snappy processor, and persistent wireless data connection for an entire day. I didn’t really notice all-day-multi-day battery on a phone until the SonyEricsson Z520 in 2006, which I could go four days without charging.
5) Mapping and GPS worth a damn. You needed civilian GPS plus Google Maps in a phone-sized package, which didn’t appear until around 2006 (and didn’t become realistic until it could leverage the phone’s A-GPS). The phone needed both before it could replace a commercial GPS – but by 2012, a standalone GPS made as much sense as a standalone point-and-shoot still camera.
6) Speaking of, a camera good enough to replace a basic point-and-shoot camera. You didn’t start to get five megapixel cameras in phones until late 2009 or so.
And most of all, 7) a public awareness and demand for devices that would do just such a thing. Despite Blackberry, despite Sidekick, despite the best efforts of Windows Mobile and Symbian, you don’t really get this in the United States in any meaningful way until the day Steve Jobs stands on stage at MacWorld SF 2007 and asks “Are you getting it yet?” They had done a cellphone that played music, and they didn’t want an iPod that made calls – they wanted the all-in-one. And they had to make people realize that an iPhone was something to be desired, people who thought Blackberries were for lawyers and Sidekicks were for Japanese schoolgirls.
So it doesn’t really start to happen until 2010. And then, you get the Nexus One and the iPhone 4. The first Android phone worth criticizing, and the first iPhone that required no compromises on camera or network or screen resolution.
And it’s only when you get to superphone time that some things become possible. If it’s not superphone time, Twitter is basically limited to being a blast-SMS service (and indeed was largely SMS driven for the first couple of years). If it’s not superphone time, Foursquare is pointless, Instagram is impossible, and Facebook remains something that happens while wasting time at work. If it’s not superphone time, I probably have to carry my laptop on trips longer than three days in case I need to do something for work. And if it’s not superphone time, I’m still having to download podcasts every day and sync them to my phone every night to play back the next day, and I’m always at least one and usually two days behind – instead of getting the Sports Junkies by 10 AM and Geoff Lloyd by 1 PM every day.
Superphone time changes things. It renders point-and-shoot cameras and standalone GPS satnav obsolete and damn near puts Flip out of business. It means that when a flaming engine goes twenty rows up in the stands at Daytona or a meteorite scares the shit out of half of Russia, there’s video of the event flashing around the world in damn near real time. It transforms your life as much as the replacement of public transit with automobiles and trains with airliners.