How have smartphones evolved to change our lives?

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the history of smartphones.

 

On a crowded morning commute to work, on the subway or bus in Korea, most people have something in their hands. You can easily spot it in the hands of people walking down the street, and it’s a smartphone. People are inseparable from their smartphones, using them to communicate with friends through chat apps like KakaoTalk, play game apps like Anipang, and listen to music downloaded from their computers. This phenomenon is often referred to as smartphone addiction. But when did smartphones start to dominate our lives?
First of all, as the English name ‘Smartphone’ suggests, it means ‘smart phone’. In addition to having voice messaging, text messaging, and calling capabilities like a regular cell phone, it also has a platform and interface for application developers and access to the internet. You can also check your email and read e-books on this “small computer with a telephone”. Nowadays, smartphones are constantly being refreshed with more powerful processors, more memory, and larger screens to make them more competitive. But it took a long time for smartphones to become what they are today.
The current generation of smartphones are called third-generation smartphones, while the second-generation smartphones are called PDAs, and the first-generation smartphones are PDAs with phone functions. Examples of first-generation smartphones include Sescom’s Luxiang in 2001 and Cyberbank’s PC-EPhone. A PDA was a PC in the palm of your hand by simplifying and reducing the size of the operating system used on a PC, and a cell phone was simply a phone that you could carry around. Combining these two devices into one was the significance of the first generation of smartphones, and despite the enormous promise of these first smartphones at the time, they didn’t take off.
The second generation of smartphones had a more cell phone-like design than the first. You could buy ringtones and wallpapers, but you weren’t able to use MP3 files or apps. Examples of second-generation smartphones include Cyberbank’s CB X30, LG’s KU2000, and HTC’s Touch Diamond. While the first generation of smartphones could only manage data such as schedules and contacts by connecting to a PC, the second generation of smartphones provided services that synchronized personal information without connecting to a PC and provided real-time information. The ability to manage a large amount of personal information and receive information quickly made the second generation of smartphones very popular among office workers.
The third generation of smartphones is what we see today after Apple’s iPhone was released. We no longer approach smartphones from a PC perspective. We have an operating system for smartphones, and we can create apps for them and share them with other users. The iPhone was the first to do this, and smartphone operating systems such as Android have continued to develop along the lines of the iPhone’s operating system, iOS. In addition, all the devices of the third generation of smartphones have Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, MP3, and camera functions.
So far, we’ve learned about the history of smartphones that are dominating the lives of people in Korea. Smartphones, which were once considered a combination of PDAs and cell phones, have become familiar to our lives since the third generation of smartphones appeared. Smartphones, which have better performance than PCs and are changing the way we live, are expected to become the fourth and fifth generation of smartphones in the future, and what features they will have and how they will change our lives.