When did smartphones actually become useful?

I happened to listen to a podcast episode where the hosts discussed smartphones, and the first time they remembered using a smartphone and finding it useful.

I do remember the first time I encountered a smartphone and thought it was stupid. It would have been back when I still thought graduate school was a good idea. (Speaking of stupid ideas.)  One of the other students was boasting that he didn’t need to buy textbooks because he had found pirated PDF scans of them online and could read them all on the screen of his Palm Treo. (I think it might have been the very first Palm Treo that could work as a phone.)

Given that his eyes looked like he had just been pepper sprayed, this was not a good advertisement for reading a giant textbook on a tiny screen.

Anyway, shortly after that I realized that graduate school was a terrible life choice and went into IT support instead.

But back to the main topic! The first time I used a smartphone and found it useful was in 2013, specifically a Samsung Galaxy S3.

This, I know, was pretty late in the game for the smartphone revolution. There were a couple of reasons I didn’t get a smartphone for a real long time.

Cost, obviously, was a big one.

However, the bigger reason was that, as mentioned above, I was in IT support for a long time, and when you work in IT, new technology is usually a Very Bad Thing. New technology inevitably causes problems. More specifically, when you work in institutional IT new technology 1.) won’t work, 2.) will cost a lot of money, and still won’t work, 3.) will cause numerous unpredictable problems with existing systems, 4.) will expose the institution to liability, and 5.) is probably controlled by a hostile foreign power.

More annoyingly, end users are usually ridiculously excited about new technology and become upset when they can integrate it with existing systems. “Why can’t I use Alexa to read patient records aloud to me?” the end user will demand. Then you’ll patiently explain how this wouldn’t work and would actually violate several different state and federal privacy laws and expose the institution to massive civil and possibly criminal liability. What will happen then is the end user will go away, secretly purchase an Alexa with departmental funds, try to use it to access patient records, and somehow wind up bringing down the entire network in the process.

This will, of course, be your fault.

So if you work in institutional IT support, like I did, you are automatically suspicious of all new technology, and in the 2000s, smartphones definitely fell under the category of Suspicious New Technology.

A significant reason for that is that the early 2000s era smartphone platforms were just not very good. There were two big ones I encountered often – Windows CE/Windows Mobile, and Palm OS. Windows CE/Mobile often came on these clunky PDA-esque devices with slide-out keyboards. They had larger screens, but the resolution was so low that the image quality wasn’t very good, and the keyboards were so tiny and unresponsive that it was nearly impossible to type on them. Palm Treo devices were usually more compact, but they still had tiny screens and it was very difficult to type on the keyboards.

Then, of course, Blackberry came along. It’s almost forgotten nowadays, but for a while Blackberry had a weird cultural penetration & mystique. Like, everyone knew that Important Business Leaders used their Blackberries to send and receive Important Business Emails! Blackberry had such a reputation as a device for Important Leaders that then-President Obama was reportedly dismayed that he couldn’t keep using his Blackberry once he entered office in 2009 since it represented a security risk. So, as lot of end users who thought of themselves as Important Business Leaders (whether they actually were or not) had to get their Blackberries to send their Important Business Emails.

I will say this for Blackberry – their software was significantly better than Windows CE/Mobile and Palm back in the 2000s. Overall, it was a lot less janky, for lack of a better term. That said, if you wanted to use Blackberry with an institutional Microsoft Exchange email server, you had to shell out for a dedicated Blackberry email server to push emails out to Blackberry devices. That was expensive, to say the least. While Blackberry was less of a support headache than Windows CE/Mobile and Palm, it was still troublesome enough to support that I had absolutely no interest in buying a Blackberry device for personal use and I never did.

Of course, by the end of the 2000s and the start of 2010s, the iPhone was starting to spread out from the early adopters. The day the iPhone was released in 2007, the CEO of Blackberry famously said that the iPhone represented no threat to Blackberry, which is right up there with “we will take the enemy capital in three days” and “home prices always go up” in terms of failed predictions. The iPhone first gradually and then rapidly ate Blackberry’s market share, with Android following right along.

Android, of course, came out shortly after the iPhone, and there was a massive series of lawsuits between Apple and Google arguing about whether or not Google basically copied the iPhone and turned it into Android. (It’s easy to forget now, but Google and Apple used to be much more friendly in the pre-smartphone days.) The first Android phones that I encountered in the wild weren’t great. I think the first one I needed to support was the Motorola Droid, which was thick and clunky and not super fast. But – and this is critical – it was a lot easier to use and set up than a Blackberry. And you didn’t need a dedicated email server to push messages to an Android!

Google and Samsung have sort of a love/hate relationship, because Samsung sells more Android phones than anyone else, including Google itself, which means Samsung can (and has) dictated terms to Google in the way that no one else can. However, the very first Android phone I saw and thought “this doesn’t suck all that bad” was the Samsung Galaxy S3 in early 2013. At the time, I still had a flip phone, but it was starting to have problems and it was getting to be time to move on. So I bit the bullet and bought a Galaxy S3, wincing all the while at the cost.

Now we come to the main point of the post – when did I first find a smartphone useful?

It was the very next day after buying the S3. I still wasn’t entirely sure that buying the phone had been a good idea. But I had to go out on a support call that involved visiting a network closet and figuring out which Ethernet ports in the building were live. I brought along my usual notebook and pen so I could take notes on the port map in the closet. But as I stood in front of the rack holding the Ethernet switches, I realized I didn’t need the notebook. I could just take a picture of the port map, and the S3’s camera was good enough and the screen was big enough that I could zoom in and look at the entire map at once. This saved me a lot of time.

So, after nearly a decade of dealing with smartphone related problems, I finally conceded that they could be useful. It just took me like eight years after the first time I saw on in the wild. 🙂

-JM