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Yesterday’s list of Five Gadgets That Were Killed by the Cellphone proved rather popular. It also provoked a lot of response, some in the more traditional form of hate mail* and some offering suggestions for yet more victims of the cellphone’s relentless growth.
Here are few of the things we didn’t include, yet have certainly been clobbered by the gadget widow-maker that is the mobile phone.
Photo: artzy.viva/Flickr
(The Pager
The most popular suggestion was the pager.
5 gadgets? How could you forget the ubiquitous pager? In the not too distant past no drug dealer would leave home without it. The pager was the number one casualty of the rise of the cellphone. – Lenny
I couldn’t put it better, Lenny. The beeper was indeed killed by the mobile, and rightly so: Not only were you always on call, you had to find a payphone in order to ring back, and you had to pay for it.
It offered some advantages, though — doctors could go out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and be called off to work just after ordering (every medical drama made in the 1990s) and, on the other side, patients awaiting transplants could be tipped-off the moment the organs were in stock. All in all, though, a text message is a lot quicker and easier.
The Wristwatch
I still wear a wristwatch, although more as jewelry than as a time-telling tool. In fact, judging by the number of unusable watches our own Danny Dumas buys from Tokyo Flash, it’s probably safe to say that watches don’t even need to tell the time anymore. The cellphone may not have killed the watch, but it has certainly made it less essential. That hasn’t stopped the likes of Vertu trying to hawk overpriced "luxury" cellphones to the same people that buy Rolexes.
Pocket Calculator
I got a surprising amount of suggestions for this one, and I actually considered putting it on yesterday’s list. But although the cellphone will add, subtract and everything else, the keypad just isn’t up to the task.
Anyone who adds up in a professional capacity (accountants, bar managers, shop owners) will always prefer a big, solid desktop calculator. Those things are accurate, and above all, fast. You try tapping $100,000 worth of receipts into a cellphone and see how long it is before you throw the thing out the window.
Alarm Clocks
True. Although an iPod also makes a pretty good alarm clock, and it doesn’t irradiate your head as you sleep.
SatNav
Another great suggestion. GPS is finding its way into more and more phones, and even those that don’t have it can guesstimate your position using cell-tower triangulation. The problem is that many phones need a network connection to actually pull down a map, whereas standalone SatNav devices store everything on-board and only need to connect to the satellite.
This means that a phone makes a pretty bad GPS device when you are out in the wilds — arguably where you need it most.
Books
Here at Gadget Lab, we’re fans of reading books on the iPhone, but we still don’t think the book is anywhere near dead. For starters, the screens on cellphones just don’t cut it as e-readers (although the iPhone gets close with a decent size and high 163ppi resolution). Heck, even purpose-built e-readers aren’t there yet.
One day, though, the dead tree version will be obsolete, but we give it some years yet. The irony? Tiny text files are perfectly suited to small, low power devices.
Handheld Consoles
Will the phone kill the Gameboy? Perhaps. Nokia tried it with the taco-shaped N-Gage and failed. Apple is trying with the iPhone, and doing OK. But in the US the Nintendo DS is the second best selling console for October, beaten only by the Wii. Nintendo is shifting around half a million of them every month. That doesn’t sound like a dead market.
What’s certain is that the cellphone is becoming the default device for more and more things, slurping up other gadgets like a a giant Katamari Damacy ball. It might not be the best tool for a given job, but it’s certainly the most convenient.
*The best hate mail was this one:
(You are so full of s**t that I hope they do not pay you to write your dribble and some [...] Gandpa [sic] my ass—-who are you a young punk who cannot get a job except for writing???
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