"Dumb" Phones & other ironic wordplay.

"Jailhouse" Smartphone by Brian K for Go Outside Magazine
http://felipeluchi.com/59761/522767/advertising/go-outside-magazine-jailhouses

A smartphone is a little box where your social skills go to die. But... perhaps I should give you a less biased definition, for argument's sake.

A smartphone is a “cellular telephone with built-in applications and Internet access. Smartphones provide digital voice service as well as text messaging, e-mail, Web browsing, still and video cameras, MP3 player, video viewing and often video calling. In addition to their built-in functions, smartphones can run myriad applications, turning the once single-minded cellphone into a mobile computer.”
- PC Mag Encyclopedia. 

So basically a Smartphone is everything under the sun wrapped up in a little package all for your convenience, that's a little bit more of an optimistic summary.

Smartphones link us all in ways would couldn’t dream of 15 years ago, let alone 5, which leads to immeasurable profits for the big corporations as well as infinite opportunities of connection for us as users, but at what cost does this connection come?

So very true. And sad.
http://funny-pictures-blog.com/2011/12/31/nokia-vs-iphone-meme/

A Smartphone is the gift the keeps on giving to the corporations, gone are the days when you’d buy your Nokia 3210 where you’d have your texting, calling and that little bit of entertainment of the side Snake (or Snake 2 if you were pretty special). We’ve come a long way from those days with Smartphones allowing us all to put our finger on the pulse of everyone else’s fingers.

The smartphone is a clever little tool because once upon a time a phone was a one off sale but now it’s the gift that keeps on giving to the corporations. They say "it's a service now, not a product" but we can safely say a better name for it would be a cash-cow. This "service" takes the form of apps.

Indeed.
http://www.memecenter.com/fun/171580/remake-of-app-store-meme

Apps are the new drug of choice for many people from all walks of life, making millions upon millions of dollars at a constant rate for all the big companies. Truly ingenious, and that’s not even getting started on the internet usage fees being charged by the phone companies who pay Apple, for example, millions of dollars for the privilege of buying and selling it’s products. 

As much many as Apple makes from its App Store it isn’t all THAT bad, it does give the Indie developer a chance of sucsess (even if Apple are taking much of the profits). Steve Demeter, the lone developer of iPhone game Trism, made $250,000 in it’s first two months of Sale.

"I really didn’t think about the money, I got an e-mail from a lady who’s like, a 50-year-old woman who says, ‘I do not play games, but I love Trism.’ That’s what I did it for."

– Steve Demeter (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/indie-developer/).

This quote segways well into my main point, Smartphones (and their big brother tablets) run very intuative and simplistic operating systems which means they reach demographics computers never could. So in that Smartphone transcend market segments (age, nationality, geographic location, sex)they are allowing us all to connect to each other on a constant near meaningless basis.

Should I (or do I) care that that pretty girl I met once as a barbeque has a new cat? No, but with a Smartphone I can view the pictures of it as a catch a train to work.

The Internet (Read: Reddit) F#$%ing loves cats.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/12nwpy/depressed_cat/

Smartphones undoubtably have a negative effect on the social and ethical behaviour of those that use them. They breed a culture of introverted, isolated, and all-in-all socially crippled people who are unable to deal with real human interaction because they have been trained to communicate with others through their little tidbits of text (but more on that in other posts). Through this, they reduce the social standards of the populace and breed the idea that ignoring social standards and laws. No good can come from this perpetual needless flow of information that is purported to ‘connect’ us.

"Does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk?... Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries -- and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway."
- Tom Hodgkinson, writer for the Guardian (http://socialnetworking.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001614)

 Now I enjoy my iPhone 5 (previously my iPhone 2, 3s, and 4), it’s Angry Birds, Facebook, Sport articles, memes, and constant Facebook updates as much as the next guy (possibly more, I am head over heels addicted) and yet I can still recognise the issues when I see them. Smartphones are a vechile for profits and social degradation.

These is all this talk in the gadget media of 'what will be the iPhone killer?', the iPhone killer should be social conscience, we need to wake up and see where this stuff is leading us.