Are you App'solutely sure you're on the right track?
Posted by Joe Sgroe on Tue, Oct 18, 2011 @ 08:08 AM
I am pretty sure we won't remember when it got to us, when it got to be part of our daily lives. Once when you woke up, you picked up the paper and browsed through the news. Now, all of a sudden we are writing, we are tweeting, we are connected with every fiber of our being to what's going on everywhere else. We write about others and we @mention and we use #hashtags; we are using symbols...hieroglyphics. We are curators, limited to 140 characters regardless of whatever it is we would really like to say. We love to update our status with what we are thinking, what we are doing, where we are at. We are selling our personal information but we are not getting paid; we are Facebook.
We buy phones we can customize...we buy "smartphones". We load hundred of apps and we spend countless hours on each one of them. We have apps for news and entertainment and communication and self-help. We engage in long term data contracts; gigabytes is our new gold. Forget 1,500 minutes, unlimited nights and weekends - that's history.
There is a lot to question about the future of voice as an "over-the-top" service application now. With speculations that Apple, for example, should be looking into acquiring a mobile carrier placing FaceTime, its video and voice communications platform, as the center of the iPhone, it simply blows my mind. The technology of voice communication is shifting right before our eyes.
Come to think about it, really, there should be no voice plan on your mobile phone service...let me reiterate, no voice on a mobile phone! Just a streamlined data-only service plan with access to hundreds of thousands of apps, music and video streaming already available and at your fingertips. VoIP becomes just another native service, running just like the highly acclaimed Angry Birds or even Facebook. As we know, voices are for singing; VoIP is for talking. It's scary...but true.
As evolution progresses, voicemail will eventually bite the big one as well. The service that we were so dependent on for such a long time will become obsolete and eventually disappear. Why? IM. Why call and bother someone when you can just drop a single simple line of text? "omg cmb ttyl :)"
Gradually, as our attention span becomes limited and our communication abilities become stunted, maybe we'll look back and wonder how we came to this place. Or maybe we'll just head on over to the Marketplace and see if there's an app for that.
How many hours do you spend on your smartphone? How many apps do you have? I'd love to know, so drop a comment below!