Excerpt
The Smartphone Coup
For a truly dying technology, we have to differentiate between a violent coup and, say, a disorderly protest. One changes everything, while the other might get a law passed.
From the current vantage point, it appears the smartphone is one of the game-changers.
"These kinds of Swiss Army-knife things that today we call cell phones and tablets are going to put a lot of pressure on single-function boxes," says iSuppli analyst Jordan Selburn. "Anything that does only one function is at risk."
Indeed, smartphones could change the items we put in our pockets before work: keys, money, and credit cards. And many single-use devices that have revolutionized life in the last few decades are bound for the landfill due to smartphones: MP3 players, cameras, PDAs, dash-mounted GPS systems.
