The Smartphone

It’s still 2017, barely. But it is definitely going to be the 21st century for a while, that's for sure. One thing 2017 gave us was the iPhone X, and the Samsung Galaxy S8, and Note 8. But one thing the 21st century gave us was the smartphone. That amazing box of hardware that lots of people cant pry their face out of. But let’s be honest here, we could survive without smartphones, but how different would life be?

When you’re in your car, and you want to know movie times so you can coordinate with your friends when to see the new Star Wars, you can’t do that without a smartphone. All your friends will be at the movies while you’re home charging a phone that has a battery life of about 6 hours.

Smartphones are integrated deeply into our society. You can check the weather without a computer, you can add an event to your calendar, or you can take a beautiful picture. You can set a timer or an alarm. You can pay for your groceries. You can listen to music, do your bills, or type up a document. My iPhone is super productive and is always useful no matter where I am. I started with a basic phone and built up to a smartphone.

I appreciate basic phones for what they did in the early late 90s and early 2000s, but their time is done. Their functionality is too little for this age. We’ve advanced so far everywhere else that owning a basic phone is like owning a relic. But that’s exactly what it is, a relic. It’s history from another time, and it’s the inspiration for what we have today. Even though we all know that an iPhone X and a basic phone have absolutely nothing in common, they do have the same roots.

Although I believe in smartphones, and I have heard peoples complaints about them, I don’t believe that they are the problem. People have problems anyways, if we didn’t have smartphones, people would still text on a basic phone and drive, and that actually sounds worse. And it’s not the phones fault that its user cannot handle their time well enough and spends so much time on Facebook, nor is it Facebook's fault. People need to learn to manage their time better, and not blame it on material objects so much.