Popular Products That Smartphones Are ‘Killing’

As smartphones establish their resilience in hands and pockets of all sizes, our convenience in performing day-to-day tasks is reaching an all-time high. However, phones bring with them some collateral damage: the extinction of many gadgets we’ve used and come to love over the years. We are living at the tail end of many devices’ life spans. Some of them are already obsolete while others slowly inch towards their end one day at a time.

Let’s check some of the popular products that smartphones are putting on death row:

1. Dictionaries

The “define <word>” feature of Google Search is extremely convenient to use on the go, it offers word games to enhance one’s vocabulary, and pronunciation guides are all over the internet to work around learning phonetics. But that’s just the surface of it.

Almost all major dictionary brands have online versions of their dictionaries integrable with any ebook reader or app, enabling the search to be incomparably faster than the traditional alphabetical lookup. Support for hundreds of languages is installable on a device in minutes, with translations being available instantly. The internet community took this a step further by developing Fictionaries; online dictionaries for fictional works which define in-world terms without spoiling future books. What a time to be alive!

2. Telephones/Landlines 

Landlines, more specifically. It sounds fairly obvious and a little anticlimactic, but there is more to this “replacement” than what meets the eye – literally in this case. Phones are not only replacing physical devices but also the underlying telephone network. This is a global change, requiring a constant update of hundreds of components of the network. 

With the continuous advancement in communication technology, phones are going wireless, eliminating the need for a human operator to establish a call. Internet telephony or Voice-over-IP (VoIP) doesn’t need the landline network at all! We can set voice and video calls up using the internet, which opens a large window of further research, all of which would only make landlines outdated.

3. Wallets

While not technically a “gadget”, wallets are worth mentioning on this list. Walking through local streets, the view of QR codes greets one at almost every storefront. Glued on walls, hanging from the counter like ornaments, sometimes even integrated with the shop’s interior design! Occasionally, the PayTM jingle resounds from a nook among the hustle and bustle of the crowd. With many people using UPI and digital currencies, wallets slowly shift from being a utility article to a fashion accessory. The recent COVID-19 pandemic further caused people to migrate to cashless transactions, and this trend is here to stay. The 2020 McKinsey Global Payments Report showed that cash usage by volume has decreased universally in the last decade.

Even though this change might not be drastic in most countries, the report mentions that the pandemic will probably lead to a further decrease in cash usage.

4. Alarm Clocks

“I could not remember the last time the beeping of a physical alarm clock echoed in my house.” Indeed, a 2011 survey of 1600 people by YouGov showed that 48% of people between the ages of 16 and 34 use their phones as alarm clocks. While the traditional alarm clock proves to be a prime choice for students and aspirants for competitive exams, the smartphone alternative often offers a clean user interface, with infinite options of music you can choose to wake up to. Alarms these days also integrate with the calendar, giving the user full control over the days and times when they wish the alarm to ring.

5. Cameras

There is time yet for mobile phones to match a high-end DSLR or a movie camera, but we are getting there. Unsane (2018) is a psychological horror film directed by Steven Soderbergh that’s shot entirely on the iPhone 7 Plus, and it’s not even the only one of its kind! Indie filmmakers and photographers have been using their phones as their preferred tools for their art. Phone-exclusive photography contests such as the Mobile Photography Awards have a prize pool as high as $10,000, which propels the medium forward. The community of mobile photographers is ever-growing. Accessibility also plays a major role here as casual hobbyists find a relatively forgiving learning curve on mobile cameras, on top of the marginally lesser cost of phones.

6. Retro Gaming Consoles

Gone are the days when kids used to run home after school to tackle an unusually hard level of a game on their PlayStation Portable. When friends could trade their virtual Pokémon by linking their Game Boy Advances with a cable. Evenings when you would blow air into a Nintendo cassette before plugging it in to play Super Mario Bros. or Contra. While modern-day gaming consoles stay unparalleled in their processing power, most retro games are exclusively played on smartphones. For almost every console, an emulator can be installed on a smartphone to run games cross-platform and relive that childhood bliss, tasting nostalgia through a six-inch screen.

Is this “monopolization” of capabilities by smartphones a good thing? Or is it pushing us to an age where other gadgets can have no identity and worth at all? Whatever the case may be humanity stands at the historical peak of technology and there’s only one way to go from here. Forward. We’ve only just begun.