The 21st Century Model T Ford

Picture: Apple

The date when, arguably, face-to-face conversation ended was 9 January, 2007. It was the date when the television set, as the “electronic hearth” of collective family engagement, ground to a halt. It was when the morning commute (remember that?) became a head-hunched, spinal strain-inducing exercise in what we British islanders, in particular, do better than anyone else - social avoidance. Because that was the day Steve Jobs introduced, with customary understatement, “a revolutionary and magical product" that he claimed was "literally five years ahead" of any rival: the iPhone. 

Apple’s press release on the day said that it combined three products: the aforementioned phone plus “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, Web browsing, searching and maps.” There was also an “entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control [it] with just their fingers,” adding that it ushered in “an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.”

This was peak dream-weaving Jobs. As Apple had done with the iMac in the previous decade and indeed the iPod in 2001, they’d taken an existing concept and made it desirable and cool. The iPhone was certainly not the first smartphone (anyone working in the corporate world would have already endured years of BlackBerry envy as they were provided to more anointed colleagues), nor was it the first touchscreen-enabled gadget. But, Jobs’ spin notwithstanding, for once, the tech marketing cliché “revolutionary” was broadly applicable. 

In addition to cellular connectivity and the music player, what really drove the revolution was the iPhone’s ability to carry a vast array of native software applications, a statement in itself, given how “app” has established itself in the common lexicon. In fact, those colourful app icons we tap on our smartphones are as significant as the expensive hardware they're downloaded onto. In old(ish) money, Uber or Deliveroo would be regarded as online destinations, but we all use them as physical services that just happen to be accessed through an app on our phones. 

Today, nearly 90% of British adults own a smartphone, with ownership in older demographics notably increasing during 2020, most likely because of lockdown necessitating connectivity. Despite their upfront cost - a full-specced iPhone 12, bought outright, will set you back just under £1000 - they have become indispensable, but they can, too, be easily be taken for granted. They are, despite their form factor, highly sophisticated computing devices equipped, invariably, with camera technology to rival that from the big names in photography. One common trope, however, is that the smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than the technology that landed Apollo 11 on the moon, which is a fallacious comparison, given that NASA was working with beyond-state of the art capabilities in 1969. But it’s not a bad way of looking at the sheer power today’s smartphones represent, and the - still - unprecedented functions they perform.

This forms the core of Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era, a new book by Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology editor, and someone who was there where it all began. In fact, when it began. Recalling that Jobs press event early in 2007, Rory went on to compare, on the BBC, the new Apple phone to the Model T Ford in terms of its potential impact. Viewers complained that he’d given a commercial launch too much prominence on the BBC’s ad-free airwaves, and even Rory himself was initially worried that he’d gone “over the top”. But on later reflection, he felt totally vindicated, writing on the tenth anniversary of the launch that it had truly been a “moment in history”, heralding “the key transformative technology of the last decade, putting powerful computers in the hands of more than two billion people and disrupting all sorts of industries.” Rory expounds on this shift in the book, discussing how Apple's effective invention of the smartphone founded entire industries and economic ecosystems. I was working at Philips at the time of the iPhone launch, and as its evolution began, it became apparent that it wouldn’t just eclipse the predominant handsets from Nokia, Motorola and others, but posed an existential threat to PC manufacturers and consumer electronics brands as well. Over time, the smartphone would become your TV set, your home cinema, you music system and its content library, and - crucially in its development, Rory points out - your camera (a moot point with me, given the forest of phones you have to peer through at gigs…). 

But, Always On also argues, the smartphone didn’t just become a replacement for a multitude of devices. It also turned “software” into “app”, the word even your granny is now familiar with. How many times a day do you interact with an app, or hear the word? Even freedom to travel might soon be facilitated by the NHS app, acting as a Covid passport. So, when you combine the hardware, the software, the functionality, the connectivity, the rise of social media and the innovation of app developers (even the term “swipe right” has entered popular convention thanks to Tinder), you can begin to appreciate the enormity of what that rectangular box in your pocket represents.

Always On delves deeply into the smartphone's social impact, not just focusing on the consolidation of consumer electronics into a single device, but on the global impact of digital engagement facilitated by it, as our “hyperconnected” society lives and breathes on social media, elects governments, supports economies, finds people jobs (and loses them through misuse…) and more. Rory even draws on the role the smartphone plays in healthcare, given how the NHS app was placed front-and-centre in the fight against COVID-19. My own company, Vodafone, helped develop an app called DreamLab, which enables Imperial College London to effectively crowd source the immense computing power of dormant smartphones at night to dramatically shorten the number of thousands of hours required by human research into developing therapies for cancer and the coronavirus. 

Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory, however, has an even more personal health connection with the smartphone: a couple of years ago, while doing a live demonstration of 5G technology on BBC Breakfast News, viewers noted a tremor in his right hand. Unbeknownst to all but a few friends and colleagues, he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease some months before. Shortly afterwards he revealed on Twitter what he’d been going through: “It was a vivid example of the positive side of what this book describes as the social smartphone era,” he writes. He says we’re now immersed in an era in which technology has become personal, in which these devices enable us to connect with “friends, strangers, celebrities and even Presidents and Prime Ministers via new networks which appeared to democratise communication.” There is, though, a negative side to this - an acute example being the recent football boycott of social media, the result of the repugnant racist, sexist and homophobic abuse that some players of both genders have had to endure - but Rory hopes that his book faithfully examines the positives of what smartphone technology has done for individuals and society in general, as much as its dark side.

To return, though, to my introduction to this post, there is still a residue of old farts who look upon the revolution that Jobs’ heralded as the start of a societal breakdown that will never be repaired. The response to such arguments is always ‘do you want to go back to how it was?’ (i.e. outdoor toilets, steam trains, ‘the wireless’, etc). “We have a slightly problematic nostalgia that romanticises the past,” Professor Daniel Miller, leader of a 16-month international anthropology study into smartphone use told The Times recently. “TV was way more passive,” he added. “Smartphones are far more interactive and far more social. So why is that a loss?”. Miller and his colleagues argue that the Internet has, rather than creating digital zombies, brought society together. The problem, they say, is that digital connectivity has also brought down divisions within individual households. We’ve all done it: we’ve all sat there as families, idly thumbing through our phones while half watching something on TV.

Rory Cellan-Jones’ original thesis that Steve Jobs produced a Model T Ford for the 21st century with the iPhone shouldn’t be in any doubt. But, says Miller, it comes at a social price. “At any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone,” he said in The Times interview. It’s almost, he believes, as if the smartphone has become too ubiquitous. “We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets,” Miller and his colleagues write in their study, going so far as saying that we spend more time ‘in’ our phones than in our own homes. Moreover, they contest, the smartphone now plays such a fundamental role in how we engage with our families, friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians and anyone else we can just ping on WhatsApp, the technology has virtually become as basic a form of human communication as talking. That, though, is nothing new. Almost every form of technology communication is accused of supplanting something else.

Which is what makes Rory’s book so engrossing. As the BBC’s primary technology correspondent since January 2007, and indeed the week when Jobs strode the Moscone Center stage, replete in trademark polo neck, stonewashed Levi’s and New Balance trainers, he has reported on every gadget, trend, startup, collapse, innovation and outbreak of industry hyperbole since. And when you put it all into perspective, you’d struggle to disagree with the central belief that Always On entertainingly proffers, that most of those “breakthroughs” my peers in technology PR peddle don’t even come close to the smartphone. 

The telephone is generally regarded as one of humankind's greatest creations, after the printing press, the electric light and industrial manufacturing. I’d argue that, given that it is more than just a mobile phone, the smartphone might one day find itself up there in the same pantheon of achievement.

Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era by Rory Cellan-Jones is published tomorrow,  13 May, by Bloomsbury

I'd love to be in Barcelona...but is it worth it?

It's more than possible that until the brouhaha surrounding the Chinese telecoms vendor Huawei blew up a couple of weeks ago, you'd never have heard of 5G. But all of a sudden, a telecommunications technology that had previously been discussed only in the trade press was front page news, albeit for political reasons rather than industrial. In the days leading up to and including the UK's controversial decision to allow Huawei to potentially supply equipment to the likes of Vodafone, Telefónica/O2, Three and EE, I'd been seething. With the news being reported in the mainstream media by mostly political correspondents, each weighing up the pros and cons from within the British body politic, as well as objections from the White House (which, we are told, led to a furious row between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump), I was constantly reading about the "UK's 5G network" [singular], despite the fact that anyone with a basic knowledge of the situation would say they should be reading about "networks", given that the 'Big Four' commercial mobile services, plus providers of private networks, would be the main actors in any ruling on who they could or couldn't buy 5G kit from.

Then there was the assumption that 5G could only be referred to in terms of conventional mobile functionality. Many in the telecoms industry agree that downloading Game Of Thrones in a fraction of the time you can on a 4G phone is not going to drive 5G. The bigger opportunity will be applications you'll probably never be aware of, like enabling surgeons to carry out operations remotely or making freight ports significantly more efficient. And, yes, there's always the possibility of driverless cars, although I wouldn't hold your breath for that appearing any time soon. But it's this point of what 5G will be able to do, beyond just making your mobile whizzier, that makes the whole row over Huawei more serious. And not just because of  'trust' concerns. 5G will, potentially, become an all-pervasive communications technology, one which, via a number of varieties (in other words, frequencies and wavelengths), will offer different means of access for different types of access need, including 'machine-to-machine' communications and the so-called 'Internet of Things', where devices and sensors talk to each other, speeding up everything from urban traffic to managing factories remotely from the other side of the world.

While the Huawei row rumbles on even further this weekend, a new twist to China's involvement in the development of 5G has occurred, inadvertently. Later this month Barcelona is to host an event that can actually be measured in terms of the city's annual revenue: Mobile World Congress, a gargantuan trade show for the telecoms industry, and an event on the same scale as CES, the monster techfest in Las Vegas each January. Over the last ten years, MWC has become increasingly about 5G, to such extent that the last one I attended, in 2018, was only about the fifth generation technology. Trade shows like MWC are sometimes seen by attendees and observers alike as bloated beanfeasts, wherein tens of thousands of sales people descend to schmooze. In most companies, the sales process is year-round, though contracts are still signed on stands at MWC, an arcane throwback to the days when account managers would attend their company's booths holding clipboards with blank paperwork at the ready. It's an expensive business for exhibitors - for most major vendors, MWC is their single biggest annual marketing expenditure. At Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia, employee attendance was always rigorously controlled, wisely when you consider that a major stand, plus 500 employees taking part, all staying for four or five days in hotels that clearly up their room rates for the week, adding more expense in Barcelona's tapas bars and restaurants, would run to millions.

Which brings me to yesterday's news that Ericsson, the Swedish vendor and nominally one of the three anchors of MWC (along with Huawei and Nokia), has decided to pull out of the show over concerns for the welfare of its employees and customers caused by the spread of the coronavirus. Other companies, including Korea's LG, the chip company Nvidia and China's other telecom technology vendor, ZTE, have also either pulled out of MWC altogether or announced a reduced presence, again due to concerns about the increasing coronavirus spread. These may only be a few of the 2500 exhibitors each year at MWC, but there are genuine fears that Ericsson's departure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and that others will pullout in the coming days. Nokia could be one of them, with a spokesperson yesterday saying, somewhat inappropriately given the nature of disease, that "the situation is fluid". Like many MWC exhibitors, Nokia also has a substantial footprint in China, with that country being the supply chain base for much of the technology industry. Many Chinese nationals and expats will be travelling from China to Barcelona.

In all seriousness, however, can the major brands really afford to be absent from what is, arguably, the most important industry event this year for the telecoms industry, in the year that 5G is nominally supposed to arrive? I'm sure, too, that some companies' marketing executives are viewing a pullout, even this late in the day, as an opportunity to save money for other projects, again tapping into some of the cynicism that exists over whether these shows are worth it at all. My personal view is somewhat conflicted: MWC is an unbeatable platform for the sharing of news, views and ideas, for networking and for engaging customers and other 'stakeholders', like journalists and industry analysts. Annually, MWC gives everyone a boost. But it comes at a price. By the time everyone gets to Barcelona, they will have experienced the most intense few weeks of the new year, with many companies also having to report their annual financial results in the run up to the show. I, regularly when I attended, would get to the penultimate show day, the Wednesday, and then succumb to terminal man flu. Getting run down and then sick from all those germs travelling in to Barcelona from across the world was a constant hazard for those working at the show, and often compounded by the late nights and early starts (not complaining, but these shows are punishing). Companies are right to question whether the health risks - weighing above financial concerns by a high margin - really are worth it this year, given how the coronavirus spread seems to be getting worse, with cases now being a long way away from Wuhan where the outbreak began. The next few days could prove crucial, both for an event you've never heard of, and for a technology you probably hadn't heard of, either, until a few weeks ago.