The Snapdragon's in our head! Tweet

This is the year of Dragon according to the Chinese calender. Well now that has so many connections to the tech-scenario we can see around us!
The world is becoming a busier place to live. Time has picked up its pace and we can really feel it.
We no longer have the patience we once had and now everything has to be fast and faster. And so the computers have also been developing hands and legs to run alongside us.

Electronics dictate our lives now. The speed of that semi conductor chip determines the pace of our lives. Day after day faster devices are being designed and it doesn't show any sign of slowing down. but beneath all this pile of gizmos, I can only see the wastefulness of today's society.

Cell Phones were once essential for communication and one of the most important inventions ever. Adding to the bland black and white screen with some colors and a camera was a great idea. Bumping up the memory was great so that we could enjoy some multimedia (no more lugging around the disk-man ) and then things started escalating at light speed.
The Apple iPhone pushed mobiles into a whole new Galaxy (oops) and with that came a bandwagon of companies ready to show off "who got a bigger d**k". It was all about the processors and rams and the screen size.
Pricing was secondary while it was all about getting the features into the phone. I remember reading somewhere about a Chinese teen selling his kidney online for an iPhone and iPad.
The release of iPhone 5 are bringing a fresh slew of cases regarding shoplifting [video below]. I can't digest the fact that gadgets have become so much of a status symbol that people are ready to risk anything to get them.

Advertising has a lot to do with all this. And I have to give them credits for shoving down peoples throats whatever shit they want us to do. Lets pull in the example of Galaxy Note, (people are gonna hate me for this, please comment if you do) that little piece of electronic poop is too big for a phone but too powerless for any worthwhile application, again you can read in my earlier post about laptops/tablets, where I have stated why tablets can never replace computers, well mostly due to the fact that its a joke, a rich kids toy and serves not much of a purpose besides letting you watch HD movies (yea...right...movies) and small games.
The Note which cannot come under the tablet category coz of its small size, is more of an abomination and in any case not much of a productivity thing. For all you out there saying 'I can parallel process and clip out images and stuff' - an ultra-book can jack the crap out of a Note and still not cost so much. Lets also consider the fact that those high end Photoshop and other editing softwares are never gonna reach the tablets, like it is in the computer in this case - Laptops.

They say we are all moving into cloud computing and cloud storage, the most efficient storage method and all but what people miss out is that its the most vulnerable systems ever. Hacking as such has got a lot more complex and with clouds carrying information, we can all forget about the word privacy. More details here!
now who all are with me in agreeing that a ton of crappy unnecessary status updates and tweets have come just coz of girls with smartphones[no offence intended].



And this funny application about which i read in Gizmodo - said to be for women!


And how many people have managed to get themselves into trouble with wrong tweets and updates. all the man hours just wasted on some twerp with loose fingers. (UK tweet arrests and Facebook accident arrests)
And all the celebrities and VIPs getting caught red handed coz of social networking. What a waste...

Now talking about social and psychological implications of gadgets in our lives, I would love to talk about the iPhone 5. There are news about iPhone 5 being the costliest of all smartphones and that the 64 gb version is gonna cost almost $2000 (1 Lac), I bet even the american would be laughing at that outrageous figure. To top it all, the only main reason for buying the phone - the 4G and the browsing speed, is never gonna work here.(India) is this some dare Steve Jobs gave the Apple co in his will? Do they really expect people to follow iPhone as much as they did few years back. But its so sad to note that such a posh phone takes a toll on all the workers in China (Foxconn) for whom assembling these phones were so depressing that they decided to go on a strike (Foxconn strike link Brazil link China link China2). In the 'link china' the article is about 200 Chinese workers threatening suicide, and Chinese workers at Taiyun plant walking out due to low remunerations. Are we enjoying our lives at other peoples cost? How different is this from the blood diamonds in Africa then?

And what about the countless morons who lose days of pay waiting outside the iStores all around so that they can get their hands around that new iPhone 5 (longer than ever). Productivity in these gadgets have improved greatly but at the cost of the productivity of the people!
So much for cult products..

And what about the rising crime. Or the fact that many people are depressed coz of the fact that they can't afford that smartphone they are eyeing on. I always believe, living without satisfaction is equivalent to living like a corpse. And for many that's what is happening. Well talking about crime, it would be a crime if i don't mention the data-leak bug with iPhones and the vulnerability of Android phones. Giving kids these smart phones can jeopardize their safety, with viruses that scan their logs and ping GPS locations, such phones cannot be treated as just tech-toys.


And I observed that the world has moved into newer interests in mining, moving from oil, to gold to uranium now to Rare metals. Now they are usually the lanthanoid/actinoids yttrium and some more elements however whats noteworthy is that 2 nations are intensively researching on them- China and North Korea. And why do we need rare-metals? For the electronics industry! So in fact some of the huge amount of money we spend is going into rogue countries for their development. We wont feel the pinch now, but its gonna hit us soon!

I must also stress on the stagnation in innovations happening today, rather than finding something new and actually adding into a vast pool their patents, the companies try safeguarding their existing patents fighting out an endless war gradually stopping any further developments due to insufficient funding. "Oh wait a minute, we lost all the money in the last court hearing!".

This is not a hate article but a cry, for some sense in the electronics industry today... where are we going people? How serious are we about our gadgets? Should we be so addicted to them? Maybe the "rise of machines" already started. Instead of bionic humanoids we have gadgets that we just cant replace for our daily survival.. what really saddens me is the way they use such phones and applications. With social networking in phones and tons of useless apps productivity is only plummeting, deviating far away from what the smartphones were actually meant for.
PDAs [ancestors of smartphones] were first introduced for intricate and sophisticated industrial application... now it has stooped down to taking pictures of birds and sky... WTF? And we need quad core technology for that.. there is a fine line between functionality and style statement.
One must realize that...

Developing for the sake of growth is different from holistic development, giving back to the society what it has taken. And its the latter that we should follow, fighting with better and practical innovations rather.
For that alone, i should applaud Nokia for the great job they are doing, however the whole concept of smartphones and tablets are getting way out of hands here and its us consumers who should have the reign, not the companies feeding us these gadgets with their mouth-watering advertisements.
What do you think?
@/\/!