Zer0

I love my smartphone. I can use it to browse the internet. I can use it to download files. I can use it to listen to music. I can use it to post crap on Musicbanter, I can use it to watch videos. I can use it to check my emails. I can use it to take photos. But wait, hold on a second, I can also use it to make phone calls. Neat. Making phone calls is actually something I don’t use my phone for as much as the other things I’ve mentioned, quite strange considering that it’s meant to be a phone! Compared to a number of years ago this would have been unthinkable for me. It begs the question as to why we still call these things ‘phones’.

The rise of 4G really puts this into perspective. 3G still uses a circuit switching network, which has been used for telephone networks for a long, long time. 3G also uses a data network in parallel to the circuit switching network to easily allow for all those internet activities such as browsing, streaming uber cool music and of course viewing horse porn. 4G dropped circuit switching altogether and as a result dropped what has been the backbone of telecommunications since the last Ice Age. Being based purely on data, a 4G-enabled smartphone works in pretty much the same way as it would when it is connected to WiFi, bar some differences in download speeds. 4G was developed with the focus on all those other communication things you do with your phone that don’t involve dialling someone’s phone number and waiting for them to answer the fucking thing. But don’t worry you can do that too using Skype or being automatically switched back to the 3G network while you make a phone call in the normal way. Since the main use of smartphones is for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, internet browsing, streaming and various apps geared at all walks of life, the general idea of what a mobile phone is has become distorted. Today, voice calls don’t even take up a quarter of mobile network traffic, more than likely a lot less depending on how recent a source you can find for this information. They are of course literally handheld computers with the added feature of being able to make phone calls occasionally.

So what should we start calling smartphones since they’re no longer phones in the traditional sense? Palmtops perhaps? Baby computers? What should Apple call the next iPhone since it will be even further away from the basic concept of a mobile phone?

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