The Phenomenon of Smartphones

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It seems nowadays almost everybody has a smartphone. Why is this? Is it our natural instinct to follow a trend that is sweeping the globe? Or is it a tool, helping us always stay connected to the internet. I know for me, having a smartphone is most useful to check my email when I'm on the go, or look up a great restaurant after a movie. But NPR has another take on the smartphone phenomenon in their Thursday article.

Millions of people around the world are carrying smartphones and computer tablets that keep them constantly connected to the Internet. There are now more than 400,000 apps in Apple's online store — and 250,000 in Google's Android market — that allow their users to do hundreds of everyday tasks, all from the comfort of their handheld devices.

Constantly having access to these hundreds of thousands of applications has far-reaching implications for our society, says technology writer Brian X. Chen.

"Millions of us are carrying these devices that have a constant Internet connection and also access to hundreds of thousands of applications of very smart interfaces tailored to suit our everyday needs," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "If you think of that phenomenon [of being constantly connected], everything has to change: the way we do policing, the way we do education, [and] the way that we might treat medicine."

In Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In, Chen examines what it means to have an uninterrupted connection to the Internet — and how smartphone-based applications will revolutionize the way we conduct our lives on- and offline.

Read more at NPR