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It’s a Phone, We Just Don’t Talk on it Anymore

Five years ago Apple released the iPhone and, as Matthew Ingram writes over at GigaOm, it didn’t just disrupt photography, and the music and mobile software business, but the entire technology industry.

We don’t even really talk on it anymore. Or, as a report from UK telecommunications company O2 indicates, we do a whole host of things with our smart phones before actually making a call.

Via The Next Web:

Browsing the Internet is the most frequent activity on smartphones these days, accounting for 25 minutes a day, while more specifically, checking social networking sites accounts for 17.5 minutes of our time. Listening to music (15.5) and playing games (14.5) were also more popular than good old-fashioned voice calls, which apparently people only spend a little more than 12 minutes a day doing…

…According to O2’s ‘All About You’ report, which was based on a survey involving 2,000 people, we spend around 2 hours a day on average using our smartphones, which also includes other activities such as testing, emailing, reading books and taking photographs.

At GigaOm, Ingram reflects on how the iPhone has changed both news consumption and production. Think: the phone lets you take notes, record interviews, take pictures and — maybe most important — find your way to where you actually have to be.

Combine the iPhone with Twitter — along with feed readers and the general mobile Web — and you have both a news alert and publishing system in your pocket.

Via GigaOm:

In some ways, the iPhone and Twitter were made for each other: one allows for the easy creation of content and the other allows it to be easily shared and distributed far and wide. These things can be done on other handsets, and there are plenty of Android and other devices that allow for the same experience, but the iPhone was arguably the first to take those abilities and make them widely available — and appealing enough for many to want to do so.

Now we’re starting to see apps and services that take advantage of this ability, whether it’s things like iWitness or other platforms that filter user-generated content, or networks that allow smartphone users to sell newsworthy photos or videos they have taken. The San Jose Mercury News conducted an interesting experiment with an app called TapIn, which allowed users to post photos and other content about breaking news, and allowed journalists and others to send out public calls for crowdsourced photos or videos of events as well.

Not bad for a five-year-old innovation.

Image: iPhone Birthday Cake, by Garrett Dimon.