The smartphone puts the network in every pocket

The iPhone fused phone, iPod and internet device with a multitouch screen; Android followed within a year, and mobile apps became a new layer of civilization.

Why it matters

The always-connected computer became the default human interface to the world — maps, money, media, messages. It also recentralized attention and power in a few platforms, the trade-off this generation is still negotiating.

People

Steve Jobs

Threads

This event sits on Communication.

Related events

• 1991

  GSM makes phones universal

  The first GSM call was made in Finland in 1991; a shared European standard for digital mobile telephony spread worldwide, with SMS as an afterthought.

  Communication

• 1991

  The World Wide Web opens to everyone

  Tim Berners-Lee's CERN project — URLs, HTTP, HTML — was released royalty-free; by 1993 Mosaic made it visual, and the web took over the internet.

  Communication · europe

• 2006

  AWS rents out the datacenter

  Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.

  Computing · americas

From this site

• Writing · 3,000 Years of Communication Technology10 min read

Sources

• Museum of Modern Art — iPhone acquisition