The ubiquity of mobile phone technology makes the idea that you could be holding your last ever phone seem slightly ridiculous. Barring catastrophes, why would we suddenly stop using a technology we so evidently love? Because we basically already have.<\/p>\n
What is a phone exactly?<\/p>\n
We still call the devices we use so much \u2018phones,\u2019 but it\u2019s increasingly obvious that the difference between a phone, a phablet and a tablet is\u2026 whatever manufacturers can get us to say it is. The device you can send your emails from, browse the web via apps or browsers or both, take pictures and communicate via instant message services, will also let you make voice calls. And that\u2019s about all it has in common with the old cord-and-handset machines we used to call phones. (Speaking of which, as of 2013, about 30% of Americans didn\u2019t have a landline at all!)
\nWhat do we actually use our phones for?<\/p>\n
The telephone is for talking to people. But increasingly, that doesn\u2019t describe our phones at all. what we actually do with them is move data. And the amount we\u2019re moving is huge and growing.<\/p>\n
Something else that seems to be huge and growing is the phones themselves, and the same cause is at the root of both effects. That would be the 4G technology known as LTE. LTE lets you move gigantic quantities of data over 4G networks, but it\u2019s energy-hungry. Hence the size of phones, which are growing to accommodate bigger batteries in back and bigger screens in front.<\/p>\n
Even when you do make a phone call, it\u2019s not really a phone call<\/p>\n
You talk into a phone and your voice is turned into electronic signals and transmitted. That was true when you had to wind phones up and it\u2019s still true. but the way it\u2019s done has changed fundamentally. 3G and older cell networks used dedicated connections to move your voice: virtual landlines, preserving the phone-ness of phone calls. But 4G and LTE don\u2019t do that. Your voice becomes data packets, just like the rest of the internet. Even when you make a phone call, you\u2019re really using a technology that has more in common with Facetime or Skype than with anything Alexander Graham Bell would have recognised. You might already have had your last phone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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