2.1 The onward march of third information revolution in the first

The onward march of the Third Information Revolution in the first decade of 21 st Century.

Top 11 Technologies of the decade (2000-2010)

[From IEEE Spectrum, Vol 48, Number 1 International, January 2011]

Technology 1_SMARTPHONES:

In 1945 ENIAC was built. It occupied a living room. It took next fifty years (1945-1995) to bring a Main Frame Computer to a suitcase size. It took another 10 years to evolve to Smartphone size with all the features of a personal computer.

Smartphones have the features of music players, remote controls, gaming consoles. Today in 2011 they are serving as hot spots. They keep us connected to information.

In 1973 the first cell phone was invented by Motorola’s Martin Cooper with the intention of having a portable phone. But this portable cell phone became the platform for innovation upstaging the PC. Smartphone is used less as a phone and more as internet browser and game console. The tremendous advancement in hardware, software and network infrastructure has made the evolution of cell phone to smart phone possible.

The hardware of the smart phone is the following:

1. High resolution displays with touch screens or QWERTY keyboards;
2. Tiny camera lenses on the outside;
3. GHz processors;
4. Radio antennas and
5. Image sensors on the inside..

Development of Operating System(OS) was as important in the evolution of

Smartphone. It supported third-party applications and in the process extended phone capabilities far beyond what any manufacturer could provide. Smart phones can offload data and processing to the cloud servers. Current smart phones have several options: Wi-Fi and 3G. It gets connected to the best available network.

For rural and impoverished areas they are self contained unit. Neither additional network infrastructure is required nor reliable power is required. Its own battery is sufficient.

In 2007 the sales of smart phones surpassed sales of laptops and by 2014 smart phones will be the dominant medium for internet browsing.

Today text messages have evolved to twitter updates and voice chats have evolved to video conferencing. Soon we will be gathering information from wireless sensors in our environment and as well as from internet, interpreting them and deriving valuable feed back.

Eight Milestones in evolution of Phone to Smartphone:

First Milestone : IBM Simon Personal Communicator in 1993- it was a touch screen phone, with a calendar, address book, calculator, email and fax capability. Bulky , hefty and price $899.

Second Milestone : Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996- it was a sandwich of Personal Digital Assistant and Mobile Phone.

Third Milestone : Ericsson R380 in 2000 – This was the first real Smart Phone. It used Symbian OS. This was the only OS for the Smart Phones but lately it is losing ground to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

Fourth Milestone : Sony Ericsson P800 in 2002 – This had added features such as MP3 player, camera and colour touch screen.