Hanno's blog

Yesterday I deleted all the remaining data on my old Nokia 6230i phone with the intent to give it away. It was my last feature phone (i. e. non-smartphone). My first feature phone was an 5130 in the late 90s. It made me think a bit about technology development.

I remember that at some point when I was a kid I asked myself if there are transportable phones. I was told they don't exist (which was not exactly true, but it's safe to say that they weren't widely available). Feature phones were nonexistent when I started to care about tech gadgets and today they're obsolete. (Some might argue that smartphones are the new mobile phones, but I don't think that's accurate. Essentially I think the name smartphone is misleading, because they are multi function devices where the phone functionality is just one – and hardly the most important one.)

I considered whether I should keep it in case my current smartphone breaks or gets lost so I have a quick replacement. However then I thought it would probably not do much good and decided it can go away as long as there are still people who would want to use it (the point where I could sell it has already passed). The reason is that the phone functionality is probably one of the lesser important ones of my smartphone and a feature phone wouldn't do much to help in case I loose it.

Of course feature phones are not the only tech gadgets that raised and became obsolete during my lifetime. CD-ROM drives, MP3 players, Modems, … I recently saw a documetary that was called “80s greatest gadgets” (this seems to be on Youtube, but unfortunately not available depending on your geolocation). I found it striking that almost every device they mentioned can be replaced with a smartphone today.

Something I wondered was what my own expectations of tech development were in the past. Surprisingly I couldn't remember that many. I would really be interested how I would've predicted tech development let's say 10 or 15 years ago and compare it to what really happened. The few things I can remember is that when I first heared about 3D printers I had high hopes (I haven't seen them come true until now) and that I always felt free software will become the norm (which in large parts it did, but certainly not in the way I expected). I'm pretty sure I didn't expected social media and I'm unsure about smartphones.

As I feel it's unfortunate I don't remember what I had expected in the past I thought I could write down some expectations now. I feel drone delivery will likely have an important impact in the upcoming years and push the area of online shopping to a whole new level. I expect the whole area that's today called “sharing economy” to rise and probably crash into much more areas. And I think that at some point robot technology will probably enter our everyday life. Admittedly none of this is completely unexpected but that's not the point.

If you have some interesting thoughts what tech we'll see in the upcoming years feel free to leave a comment.

Image from Rudolf Stricker / Wikimedia Commons