Thirty years ago, the first Motorola Brick cellphones weighed two pounds, were as big as your shoe, cost $4,000, and airtime was $1 a minute
The first DynaTACs were owned by four different groups of Early Adopters:
- Status seekers
- Business people who spent a lot of time out of the office
- The super-rich
- and in Miami, cocaine dealers
In the 1990s, handset prices came all the way down to free
The real money was in ongoing airtime fees, not in one-time device sales.
As handsets got smaller each year, prestige was determined by size, and the smallest were the most desirable and the costliest.
Computer ownership and usage were growing at the same time
The forerunner of today’s computers was ENIAC. Introduced just after World War II, it weighed 30 tons and took up as much floor space as a tennis court.
Fast forward twenty-five years to the first IBM compatible portable computer, the Compaq
We had three at our offices. They weighed thirty pounds and were as big as suitcases. By the end of the nineties, laptops appeared, and sizes and weights continued to come down. Within a few years, laptops outsold desktops.
We crisscrossed Asia, Europe, and the Americas
We were conducting face-to-face interviews to learn about the attitudes and behaviors of computer and cellphone users. Everywhere we went, people loved their computers, but wished they were smaller and lighter and easier to carry around, like cellphones. They loved their cellphones, but wished they could do more with them, like computers.
Twenty years ago, one American in three owned a cellphone
Ten years ago it was two in three, and now it’s more than nine of ten. As technology improved, engineers packed more features in smaller spaces, and cellphones grew beyond the telephone function. First was a small window with a line or two, then three or four lines. Over time, tiny screens grew into 5 and 6 inch viewing areas.
In 2013, more smartphones were sold than cellphones
We’ve all heard that today’s smartphones have more power than the spaceship that went to the moon. True or not, they do have the power to surf the InterWeb, make movies, store thousands of photos and songs, and watch live television. And now that they can perform all the functions a computer can, three out of four Americans have one, and computer ownership is declining.
Just as we found in our research 20 years ago, small sizes have their own shortcomings
One is that screens have excellent resolution, but are about 1/100th the size of the screens on the televisions we have at home. Sure, we can watch anything we want, anywhere we want, but it’s not the same experience. We are trading size for portability.
Another drawback is there was no room for a real keyboard with full-size keys and tactile feedback
Instead, we have tiny virtual keyboards that we tap with one or two fingers. They are harder to use than the tiny QWERTY keyboard BlackBerrys <sic> we carried around the world as dedicated email devices in the 1990s.
Bonus
With room for only two fingers or thumbs, we called mini-keyboarding “chipmunking,” where people hunch over devices and peck away.
