> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.
A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.
It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.
Yep, they would have added more and more features to these increasingly powerful, increasingly generalized electronic devices that fit in your pocket until... Oops, look at that, smartphones all over again.
Today's featurephones have GPS, navigation, mail, IM, sometimes even installable apps. In 2006, we would have considered them smartphones.
If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.
Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.
In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.
I'm afraid not, no. In 2006, a smartphone was something like a Palm Treo or an HTC TyTN. In fact, that's what a smartphone has been for over a decade. Even the price points have remained similar.
The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.
