Smartphones colonised half the American market in under ten years. It took the internet just over a decade. Historically speaking, those are remarkably fast rates of adoption.
What makes this particularly interesting is the fact that information and communication technologies (of which smartphones represent an extraordinarily elegant and powerful marriage) are a general purpose technology. They have, in other words, the potential to reshape the economy and boost productivity across all sectors and industries, like electricity or the automobile. Such transformations are about far more than simple technical innovation, however. They often require wholesale remaking of infrastructure environments, of business models, and of cultural norms. Humanity has been busy taming and repurposing electricity for centuries. Before the automobile could change the structure of cities and production chains, any number of refinements were required: mass production of affordable automobile and truck models, creation of nationwide road networks (which themselves required a massive amount of legal and cultural innovation), and accompanying energy network, relocation of metropolitan building stocks, and the development of remarkable new business models like just-in-time production and container shipping. ICT will continue this process; imagine the possibilities of a world of autonomous vehicles.
Smartphones—extraordinarily powerful, mobile, data-network-connected computers equipped with GPS, accelerometers and all sort of other gee-whizzery—have become so ubiquitous so fast because they're so remarkable (and because falling tech prices have quickly made them affordable). But because they've become so ubiquitous so fast, I think we underappreciate the revolutionary potential of a world in which powerful mini-computers are everywhere, and where every person has an unfathomable about of information available all the time. Innovations like Twitter are dazzling and useful; they may well end up the technological equivalent of a plasma globe, a shiny, technological trinket that only hinted at the social and economic potential of the concepts upon which it was based.
The potential of the smartphone age is deceptive. We look around and see more people talking on phones in more places and playing Draw Something when they're bored. This is just the beginning. In time, business models, infrastructure, legal environments, and social norms will evolve, and the world will become a very different and dramatically more productive place.
