Top 10 World Changing Mobile Devices
These are the ten mobile electronics devices that have changed the world the most.
The rankings factor in the boost they gave to human productivity, learning, and quality of life. Handheld video games were the first form of electronic entertainment that you could throw in your backpack or your pocket and take on the go they were a great way to kill some time.
What first came out in the 1970’s were single games with a tiny screen like Mattel Auto Race and Game and Watch, but in 1989 Nintendo introduced the iconic Game Boy. An 8 bit system with individual game paks that could be swapped out. Two years later Sega released the sleek Game Gear which proved to be Game Boy's biggest rival, although Gameboy outsold it 10-1. For 25 years, Nintendo has dominated the handheld gaming market with products like the Game Boy Color, the Game Boy Advance and the DS, which sold 154 million units, making it the most popular handheld console of all time and just 1 million units behind the #1 overall video game console of all-time, the playstation 2. Single-purpose handheld video games have had their market cut out from under them with the rise of smartphone and tablet gaming apps. The ability to play any audio recording instantly was a major upgrade over the analog past where a specific point on a cd or cassette tape had to be referenced for a recording to play.
Digital media files didn't skip when bumped or jostled like a portable cd player and digital memory capacity meant hundreds or even thousands of files could be stored on a tiny device after loading them from a computer. Eventually images and videos could be stored and viewed on these devices as well. Back in 1979, British scientist Kane Kramer designed one of the earliest prototype players capable of one hour of play time. From 1997-2001 several companies debuted various Mp3 players, but it wasn't until Apple introduced the iPod in October 2001 that the industry really took off. By 2007, Apple had sold its one-hundred millionth iPod, positioning the company for its big iPhone release later that year. The first truly portable audio player, cassettes players allowed you to enjoy whatever music you felt like listening to at that moment, on the go, for the first time.
There were some portable 8-track players before, but the Sony Walkman - introduced in 1979 - was smaller, and allowed the user to listen with headphones (which made the music sound great), and played cheap, widely available cassettes that were becoming the industry standard. You could even record whatever you wanted from many different artists and then take it with you. And boom! The concept of the mixtape was born. Cassettes eventually gave rise to the CD player, and then the Mp3 player. One of the interesting things about the walkman was that it featured a refined marketing campaign that portrayed it as a possession you had to have if you were culturally up to date and had the money to buy new electronics, since other people would see you using it on the street. It worked, Sony sold 385 million units until it discontinued it in 2010. It may be the least exciting device on this list, but the electronic calculator was a massively important tool in building our modern society.
It helped our businesses operate more efficiently, our students learn more complex math problems, and our greatest thinkers tackle the world's toughest challenges. In 1963 the first fully electronic desktop calculator- called the Anita - hit the market. It weighed 33 pounds, used dozens of vacuum tubes and cost thousands of dollars. By 1972, with many companies in the game, pocket-sized calculators were now selling for under $100 and the first scientific calculator - the HP-35 - was introduced. By 1985 we had the first graphing calculator. Now, scientists and engineers use software on their computers to perform their calculations. The Global Positioning System - or GPS - was originally a project of the United States military that became fully operational in 1995.
It's evolved into an increasingly vital tool in many segments of the 21st century global economy, but it's especially useful for transportation, and will play a central role in the coming self-driving car revolution. There are currently 31 healthy GPS satellites in orbit around the earth, timed so no less than 6, but usually as many as nine or ten, have a direct line of sight to a GPS device operating on the surface of the Earth at any moment to provide an accurate location reading. Standalone GPS devices were a revelation in navigation. Companies like Garmin and Magellan hit the market with affordable turn-by-turn voice directed products by the mid-2000s. Now, smartphone apps like Waze and Google Maps are taking over the market. Since the United States controls GPS, other countries want their own systems. In 2011 Russia finished updating its GLONASS system to cover the whole world. Europe and China will soon have global systems of their own, and India and Japan will have regional systems in place in the next three years. The digital camera eliminated the time consuming, expensive hassle of having to process your photographs.
Since the images were now stored on digital memory instead of film, you could take many more pictures, ensuring you got the perfect shot every time. It also helped to have a digital screen that immediately displayed the photos you had taken. The first person to try building a digital camera was Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. It recorded .01 megapixel black and white images to a compact cassette tape. The first popular digital compact camera was Kodak's DC 210 which hit the market in 1998 and offered megapixel resolution for under $1,000, which was quite a breakthrough. It's the forefather to the point and shoots we know today. 2003’s release of the Canon Rebel DSLR for under $1,000 brought the DSLR into the mass marketplace.Today, smartphones are taking over digital photography. But just 14 years ago, digital photography accounted for only 1% of the photos taken worldwide, but now its over 99%. Of those that make it online, the vast majority are being stored on Facebook, which has more than 300 million photos added to it every single day. A century after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, if you had to make or receive a call, or conduct business over the phone, you were still leashed to a landline.
But with the rise of the mobile phone in the 1980’s, that leash was cut. Now you can communicate with anyone at anytime, wherever you are. The mobile phone also allowed for text messaging, an even more efficient way of communicating. The first ever handheld mobile phone sold to the public was the Motorola DynaTAC in 1984 for a cost of $4,000. It featured just 30 minutes of talk time. As more companies entered the hyper competitive market, mobile phones continued to get smaller and gain more and more features. In the early 2000s, Nokia introduced a series of highly acclaimed phones that are the best-selling mobile phones in history, featuring several units that were sold hundreds of millions of times. In 2004, Motorola released the RAZR, which dominated the market and ushered in the flip phone revolution that continued until the touchscreen smartphone took over about four years later. From 1990 to 2011, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from 12.4 million to over 6 billion, about 87% of the global population. The development of video allowed for the proliferation of television and film, and has given rise to smaller video cameras that allow anyone with just a few hundred dollars to start making videos or films.
With a picture worth a thousand words, video has allowed humanity to connect like never before, and has led directly to the rise of YouTube, the Internet's third most visited website. The first electronic cameras relied on cathode ray tubes, which used an evacuated glass envelope that was large, fairly heavy, and fragile. This gave way to the more reliable solid state image sensor. Sony's 1983 Betamovie was the first consumer camcorder. In 1995 the major manufacturers all released DV video cameras which quickly became the go-to for home video producers and independent filmmakers. In 2003 HDV made HD video recording affordable for the consumer. Tapeless recording - often on a smartphone - has become the go-to standard. The next steps in video is 3D and 4K, although its unclear right now which one consumers will favor. Smartphones have changed the world.
In addition to making and receiving voice calls, they double as a high definition still and video camera, an mp3 player, scheduler, calculator, clock, notepad, video player, gaming machine, and a whole myriad of other things thanks to apps which we download for free, or for a few bucks at the most. The first mobile phone to integrate the features of a personal digital assistant was the 1994 Simon by IBM and the first smartphones to achieve commercial success in the United States following the wildly popular NTT DOCOMO in Japan, were the Blackberry and the Palm in the early 2000’s. In 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone, the first touchscreen device to go mainstream. This was a revolutionary moment in the history of mobile electronics, and its effects are still being felt 7 years later. But now, Samsung is the dominant smartphone manufacturer, selling more smartphone units in the first quarter of 2014 than its next four competitors - including Apple - combined. The ability to take a powerful, versatile computing machine anywhere was an important moment in human history that has dramatically increased our productivity.
With the development of wireless technology and processing power, laptops have driven the full blown mobile computing revolution that's increasingly freeing us from our large, immobile pcs. Back in 1975 IBM sold the first portable computer, but the first device that looked anything like the clamshell designed hinged laptops we use today was the 1982 Dulmont Magnum. In the mid 1980’s, Zenith Data Systems developed the first commercially successful laptop computer. The company got a huge boost by winning several contracts with the US Government worth more than $100 million to provide it with thousands of machines. The month of May 2005 marked the first time laptops outsold desktop computers in the US. And one more fascinating fact: according to a security report from Dell, everyday, 1,600 laptops are stolen from people in US airports alone. That'll do it.
Thanks for watching. I really hoped you enjoyed this video. Which mobile device do you think changed the world the most?
