When I was a kid, I wanted a BMX bike. Even into my late teens, I spent the majority of my hard-earned money on bicycles.
This probably would have been normal, but I also have been surrounded by computers since I was a very small child. I remember writing my first video game by copying BASIC code from a library book to the original Macintosh that had been handed down from my academic dad to my bedroom.
I would consider myself an early tech adopter from an early age. Either as a symptom or an anomaly though, I've always understood that computers were tools, and you don't play with tools.
I don't remember the first time I saw a general purpose entertainment electronic device - there were video game cabinets and handheld single-game LCD devices. I dumpster dove an original NES and repaired a game boy, but the scope of these devices were all incredibly limited - they would, at most, play 4 games. Beyond games, there were things that started to appear though - minidisk players, graphing calculators - that started to hint at a portable multi-purpose device, but until I was in high school, computers that felt turing complete to me were all very large.
My first large expenditure on a portable general purpose computing device was a palm pilot. I remember it had a stylus and handwriting recognition, and that I used it every day, but I legitimately can't remember anything specifically that it did other than capture information and transfer it to other devices. I think that's a good thing - I'm sure it had games, and probably could do some general-purpose-adjacent things, but even as I was writing code semi-professionally (I had a workstudy job working on websites for the school district my freshman year of high school), I didn't want to take my computer with me.
I also had, briefly, a trackphone. I didn't really see the usefulness. At some point it broke and I didn't care. If you needed to talk to me, you could leave a message on my home phone and I'd respond later. At one point I had a blackberry with no service. I'd download maps when I was on wifi, but the lack of permanent connectivity barely mattered. I wanted to do stuff, not create an always-on channel for things to interrupt me.
This all remains fairly true today. I rarely if ever answer the phone when called. I don't like context switching, and I don't think anyone really does. The iPhone was revolutionary, but not because people want a phone. If your job is to respond to emergencies, maybe a cell phone makes sense. Otherwise, answering machines remain a solved problem.
But the one thing that "smart phones" did was incentivize telcos to colonize radio waves so that we could push data around. At first this was audio, but in retrospect, the reason the iPhone was so revolutionary wasn't one thing, it was three:
- It was a general purpose computing device
- It was actually usable and intuitive
- It stayed networked when away from known wireless networks
The second one was the thing that finally cracked the code, but I don't think an iPod touch could have done similar things to the world without the network, even with the first two.
So, taken on balance, is it possible we only like our phones because they are efficient tools and can network?
When I look at the iPhone duo, I see a moleskine notebook, not a phone. This thing is a utility that you'd never hold up to your face. You'd look like an idiot. I don't even know why it has cameras (I know why it has cameras, but I don't really care if it has cameras). I don't know if my experience is normal, and I doubt the thing is going to be a massive hit (although I hope it does change some paradigms) - but for the utilitarians out there, it's finally the device that I wanted when I bought that first palm pilot. It's not a phone, it's a networked notebook. It has a pencil - not a stylus - a small-but-usable keyboard, and it fits in a small purse. The remaining "Phone" feature is that it is expected to network off of known WiFi. It doesn't seem to me that it is begging to be in your pocket all day. It doesn't look like it's going to tell me to drop what I'm doing and pay attention to it.
Ask me in a year, but I am cautiously optimistic that this is - almost exactly 20 years after the release of the iPhone - finally the end of the phone.