Constant Touch
Page 12
Part four
Smartphones
Chapter 22
Intimately personal computers
Right at the beginning of this book I said that we should pay attention to the technologies that we carry around with us because they tell us a lot about what we value and why. Very few technologies have made the leap, and each one is important. We wear a wristwatch because we live in a society that is choreographed by reference to a common standard of timekeeping. We carry a comb if we care about what our personal appearance says about us to others. We carried a first- or second-generation mobile phone because communication was desirable, even essential, on the move.
But we are now carrying around a new object, one that might trick us into thinking that it is merely an extended phone, but is in fact, I think, a radically new personal device. The smartphone, towards which the first 3G phones were inching, is not just a phone. It’s a computer. And computers are unique – they are, in a crucial respect, unlike any other technology – and uniquely important in the history of the modern world.
Most devices are special-purpose machines. A comb straightens hair. A watch tells the time. A lawnmower, to give another example, mows lawns. The whole design is made to achieve this purpose. While you can use a lawnmower for other tasks – for example, propping open a door – these are limited. A computer, on the other hand, is a general-purpose machine. And it only needs three components to work: a set of instructions, a memory and a processing unit where the instructions work on the data held in the memory. You can make a computer out of almost any material. Charles Babbage designed a machine made of brass, wood and card that was the 19th-century equivalent of the computer. But we use electronics, because electrons can move at unimaginably faster speeds. The first electronic stored-program computers were built in the middle of the 20th century, at a time when the radio industry had spurred the development of lots of electronic components, such as vacuum tubes, and global conflicts increased the demand for fast calculation. These first computers were enormous, filling rooms with racks of valves and wires. But over the following decades the components got smaller and the computer shrank. The new transistors of the 1950s were tinier than vacuum tubes. Wafers of silicon the size of a fingernail, etched in the 1960s, contained hundreds and then thousands of transistors. Smaller devices were more widely useful, creating a powerful feedback effect driving miniaturisation and the spread of computers. In the 1970s small and personal computers appeared. By the 1980s they populated homes and businesses across the world.
We use the desktop computer, the general-purpose machine, for all kinds of tasks. I’m sitting at one now, writing this text. I’m also keeping an ear out for the live cricket tournament under way in Sri Lanka. I have Skype open in case someone calls, and my music is a click away too. I have Excel spreadsheets open for students’ marks, and both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers running, some linking in to organisational databases, some displaying email, while another is playing a David Foster Wallace inauguration speech on YouTube. Frankly it’s amazing I can concentrate. But there are two points to making this list. One, the computer is incredibly flexible for a single machine. And second, it’s so useful, so involving, that I’d like to carry these capacities around with me.
There are three concentric rings of ‘personal’ technologies. The outer ring consists of ‘owned’ technologies that are mine, that I use but do not move around with me. The desktop computer is an example. It’s too heavy, and anyway it is anchored via a nasty mess of wires and cables. In the middle ring are ‘portable’ technologies. I have a laptop computer which I carry around if I need it. But it’s a bit of hassle, and I’m always aware that I’m burdened. If I stop I’ll put it down. I’d rather leave it at home. Nevertheless, it is designed to be a ‘personal’ technology that works on the go – it has a battery that lasts long enough to be able to be useful, and the case has a handle, among other features. Finally, there is the inner ring of ‘intimate’ technologies. These are portable but are carried without exertion. They are kept close to the body. They are so useful or important or engaging that we don’t register their weight. Very few technologies make it through to the inner ring, and some of those that do date from the earliest periods of human existence. Right now my intimate technologies are clothes (Palaeolithic), shoes (ditto), glasses (a medieval innovation) and – my intimate general-purpose computer, my little chip of modernity – a smartphone, an iPhone 4.
The things I use my smartphone for are just as diverse, perhaps more so, as they were in the case of my desktop computer. I check my mail, send texts, update a Facebook status and skim through tweets. I browse, using Safari, websites that carry everything from national news and sport to London ornithology. I share my pictures on Flickr, listen to music on the iPod and play Angry Birds, Blitz and Welder. Under dark clear skies I can hold the iPhone up and read the stars using Starmap Pro. When bored I flick left and right through my apps to find something to do. I even, occasionally, use it to make a phone call.
I was in ‘constant touch’ with my old Nokia phone in the sense that wherever I was I could talk to my friends, relatives and colleagues. But the ‘constant touch’ of the iPhone is something more: it absorbs my attention and even when it doesn’t I find that I unconsciously reach for the familiar smooth weight. My fingers, eyes and mind are absorbed. And I am not alone – I have been in full train carriages where every passenger was communing with his or her smartphone. Each in a private bubble of constant touch.
Three things came together to help smartphones dominate in this way. None was inevitable. First, the mobile networks had to have the capacity to handle greater amounts of data. This transition was anticipated and pushed in the allocation of and payment for third generation (‘3G’) licences in the early- to mid-2000s. Second, a device had to be designed that made use of these capacities. As is often the case in the years when a technology is young, there was a huge number of smartphone designs pitched, rejected or launched. Some of them, for example the very first iPhone, depended on older GSM technologies rather than 3G. Nor was the smartphone the first intimate personal computer (handheld ‘organisers’ date back to the 1980s). However, in retrospect, it is the iPhone that stands out as the device in which key features were decisively introduced. Smartphones were not invented by Apple, but they were defined by Apple. Furthermore, the iPhone did not succeed through the talents of its designers alone. If anything, the closed world of the ‘cult of Mac’ was a hindrance to be overcome rather than an advantage, at least if the iPhone was to be a truly mass-market device. Thirdly and finally, then, the smartphone had to be discovered by its users, who experimented and found out what the smartphone was good for. Only mobile users can build a mobile culture. Let us look in more detail at each of these three secrets to the success of the smartphone.
Chapter 23
3G: a cellular world made by standards
In 1950, the major ports of the world swarmed with human activity. The job of a stevedore or longshoreman, someone who loaded and unloaded ships, was a skilled one: goods could come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and the quickest, most efficient way of moving them had to be worked out. Once dockside, the goods might wait for some time, each minute costing money, before they could be moved to market. Each port had its own system, its own traditions and its own considerable pool of labour, amounting to thousands of dockers. In the 1960s and 1970s this picture of the working dock was transformed by containerisation: goods would be packed in identical steel boxes, making the jobs of lifting on and off ship, and of transporting to and from a port, much simpler (and cheaper). Some historians credit the innovation to the experiments of the United States military in the Second World War, in which essential supplies had to be shipped to Europe and across the Pacific in a form that was secure. Others highlight the entrepreneurial spirit of Malcolm McLean, an ex-trucker whose SeaLand Inc. company began shipping goods in containers along the eas
t coast of the USA from 1956. By the 1970s it was clear that a revolution in the global transport of material goods had happened, and that it was underpinned by two fundamental developments.
First, a global technological system for transport went hand in hand with the spread of a single standard. While many agreed that a standard container was a good thing, there had been much debate about what the standard should be. The outcome was a container eight feet high by eight feet wide, with lengths either 20, 35 or 40 feet. (Universal agreement on the width and the height were crucial for stacking containers, the length not so – think about how a sound brick wall can be made with short bricks and long bricks.) If there had been many competing standards in use, then global trade, and with it the forces of globalisation, would have been significantly reduced. Second, as the standard spread – which it did by a combination of commercial and governmental decisions – the old practices and infrastructure had to be torn up and replaced. Starting with Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, container ports were built to move the standardised containers onto ships converted for the new boxes or onto trains and trucks. Some old ports – not least London, which had once been the busiest in the world – died. Others, such as Long Beach, California, were refitted at great cost. The new infrastructure was massively expensive, but was paid for by the savings in transporting goods and in savings of scale: all the world was using one standard. Ninety per cent of the world’s trade moves in containers.
A fixed infrastructure and standards mutually agreed beforehand facilitated global mobility: in the case of time zones, mobility of pocket watches; in the case of containerisation, mobility of material goods; and in the case of the internet (where the fixed infrastructure was landlines and the standards were TCP/IP protocols), mobility of non-material goods. (There are profound reasons why the latter two cases of means of moving packets, material and non-material, appeared at the same time.) And from fairly early in its history, there have been visions of how a fixed worldwide infrastructure of cellular phones would enable the global mobility of communication. We have seen how very different national systems of mobile telephony were built, and now we will see what makes a global system and why.
Jorma Niemienen, then president of Mobira, imagined in 1982 that the mobile world could be built on Nordic lines:
NMT [Nordic Mobile Telephone] is an example of the direction which must be taken. The ultimate objective must be a world-wide system that permits indefinite communication of mobile people with each other, irrespective of location.
In Vancouver in 1986, before the first call had ever been made on the second – i.e. digital – generation of phones, a gathering of telecommunications planners launched the third. Initially called ‘Future Public Land Mobile Telephone System’ or FPLMTS – ‘unpronounceable in any language’ writes Garrard, correctly – ‘the initial concept for the third generation was very simple: a pocket-sized mobile telephone that could be used anywhere in the world.’ Third-generation (3G) mobile phones started as a geographical idea, but as the internet rocketed in the 1990s it provided proof that there was public interest in, and a nascent mass market for, mobile online services. 3G became more and more a plan for mobile phones that would handle data – internet-type services, videos, games – as well as voice. The relative successes and failures, respectively, of i-mode in Japan and WAP in Europe and the United States, were dressed up as rehearsals, generation two and a half, for the data-rich 3G.
Despite the lessons taught by the cases of competing mobile standards in the United States (or indeed, the success of single standards such as Europe’s GSM or McLean’s containerisation), third-generation mobile has splintered into several different standards. So much was at stake – perhaps the biggest telecommunications sector of the 21st century – that uniform agreement was perhaps impossible to achieve in the face of divergent commercial interests. So International Mobile Telecommunications 2000 (IMT-2000, the more friendly name for FPLMTS), became the umbrella for five different standards, employing variations of all three means of packaging up and sending data over mobile networks: TDMA, FDMA and CDMA. Each had different coalitions of backers, reflecting the state of a mobile industry that had already become internationalised after a series of mergers and new operations, led by voracious companies such as Vodafone and Hutchison, and by the American ‘baby Bell’ companies’ attempts to expand away from the restrictive home markets in the 1990s. Despite the internationalisation of the mobile sector, an interesting pattern was apparent by 2002: American- and Japanese-based companies were doing better at pushing 3G than their European competitors: in a reversal of the transition from first- (analogue) to second- (digital) generation cellphones, when the United States lost the lead partly because its first generation was too successful, the success of European second-generation systems, particularly GSM, had led to apathy towards 3G.
The first licences for the spectrum space allocated to 3G mobile phones came up for grabs at the very end of the last century. With internet stocks still riding high, and where an auction format was chosen by governments, mobile companies bid against each other, driving the price for spectrum to stratospheric levels. When the bidding was over in the United Kingdom, the government received a windfall of £22.47 billion ($35.4 billion), which was prudently earmarked by the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, for paying off part of the national debt. Licences went to the four existing operators – Vodafone Airtouch, One 2 One, BT Cellnet and Orange – and a newcomer: a conglomerate, backed by the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, which launched its service called, simply, ‘3’. In Germany, a bigger potential market than Britain, the auction raised $45.6 billion, five times the amount initially expected. France refused to run such a market-driven scheme and preferred to retain central control, offering four licences at fixed prices of $4.6 billion each. Only two were taken up. Sweden, even more planning-minded, awarded licences at $10,000 each, plus a cut of profits. The German and UK windfalls were watched jealously in the United States, where the practice of local auctions was again followed for the sale of broadband Personal Communication Service (PCS) licences, with the outcome in early 2001 that a mere $16.86 billion was raised for 422 licences (113 of which went to a joint venture between Vodafone and Verizon Wireless).
But what had caused this American shortfall? By the time of the US auction the internet stock bubble was bursting, and the giant bids that had seemed necessary to secure important territories and markets in earlier months now seemed decidedly dicey. Indeed, the bids made by companies such as Vodafone were justified by appeal to the strength of their stock market value, and as these slid alongside other telecoms stocks, the expenditure looked more and more untenable. Moreover, 3G could not operate on the existing infrastructure. Entirely new networks of base stations and mobile switching centres needed to be built. Like the containerisation of ports, the great capital outlay in a gamble on a new standard was to be new infrastructure (the costs are comparable). By 2002, the licences were active but, apart from in places such as the Isle of Man, a third-generation experimental island, very few services were launched until 2003. The success of third-generation mobile phones, at this point, depended on the unknowable willingness of the public to buy them, and without good content – in the form of addictive entertainment or really useful services – a repetition of the WAP debacle was possible. On the other hand, there were great hopes that the third generation might prove to be like a global i-mode, to the great relief of the world economy.
As we have seen, sales of licences for third-generation (3G) networks raised immense revenues for European governments, less so in the United States where the auction was held after the crash in the technology stock market. Similar networks were launched in Japan, but elsewhere in 2002 you had to be in odd places like the Isle of Man to see what all the fuss was about. In the United States, 3G has followed the patchwork pattern that had been established with earlier generations of cellphones. So, for example, as early as D
ecember 2001, Verizon offered a 3G service – so long as you happened to live in a corridor of land from Norfolk, Virginia to Portland, Maine, or in the Salt Lake City area, or around San Francisco and Silicon Valley. (What is more, it would only work if you plugged it into a computer, so was not very convenient.) Further 3G services were launched soon after in cities such as Chicago and New York. Sprint, a company that has always concentrated on long-distance calls, souped up its old network to carry 3G nationwide in August 2002. Fanfares also greeted the launch of 3G in Europe, including Finland and Austria (September 2002), parts of Russia (October 2002), the United Kingdom (March 2003), Italy (May 2003) and Slovenia (December 2003).
But it quickly became apparent that launching 3G was quite different from turning on an old-style mobile network. With an old cellphone system, once it was turned on you could make calls, and that was pretty much it. But 3G promised a cornucopia of data services, and these weren’t all ready at once. The bounty remained firmly fixed in the future. (Imagine! It will be just like sitting at your computer: you’ll be able to do anything that you could via the web, except that you’ll have to squint.) So, in the early 2000s 3G crept out, with a dash of video messaging here and a smattering of live football and games there. It would be half a decade before we experienced what 3G really could do.
The launch of 3G witnessed a curious, reflexive twist on a familiar pattern in the history of communication technologies: the ways that the typical real-world ‘use’ of a technology has often been one discovered by users rather than that anticipated by producers. So, for example, Marconi thought radio would be primarily a means of sending code not voice (indeed he called it ‘wireless telegraphy’). Producers of early telephones sold them as one-way ordering devices, not instruments of trivial two-way chatter. Both email and text messaging were afterthoughts, mere secondary applications in the eyes of the designers of packet-switching and digital cellular networks. We have also seen how M-PESA as primarily a peer-to-peer money transfer system was the discovery of Kenyan mobile users rather than the anticipated main purpose of the scheme’s architects. In all five of these cases it was customers who pioneered the typical pattern of use. As 3G-type services like video messaging were added to phones, it seemed that for the first time in the history of communication technologies, the producers were not only aware of this pattern, but were also banking on it happening again. So in late 2002 – before 3G proper – Vodafone deployed the Manchester band The Mock Turtles to ask their UK customers: ‘Can you dig it?’ Quite a lot of money was riding on the answer to this question. If the users did not ‘dig’ 3G by finding its typical use, soon and with gusto, then billions of pounds and dollars, euros and yen would be lost. In fact, while video messaging failed (as it always does), the smartphone, and with it 3G, has thrived.