Tech talk: Tech’s come a long way, baby

Tech talk: Tech’s come a long way, baby

Among other things, technology, which makes our lives easy, has come a long way.

Jitendra SoniUpdated: Saturday, December 14, 2019, 10:50 AM IST
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It’s that time of year. Winters are here, people are in a festive mood. The year is about to end and so is the decade. During the last 10 years, so much has changed. We’ve aged and almost everything around us has evolved.

Among other things, technology, which makes our lives easy, has come a long way. No, we are still not using flying cars nor have humans settled on the Moon or Mars yet.

In fact, flying cars in the form of drones are almost here and leaving the Mars bit on the trusted shoulders of Elon Musk, let us see how key technology trends have evolved over the last decade.

Phones Back in 2009, wired landlines were found in every household. We had smartphones that looked like a heavy block with a display slapped on top of it. The battery would last till noon or max evening and would take more than a couple of hours to tank up again.

These devices were fragile and were not very powerful. Nokia was still ruling the market, Apple and Samsung were still trying to gain market share. Many Android smartphone brands that you see today didn’t even exist back then.

Now we have phones with huge displays, extremely powerful and capable processors and batteries that charge up in less than half an hour. While still in their nascent stage, foldable devices are already here and will soon rule the industry. Current generation phones are so powerful that they have started replacing large and bulky laptops for more than regular tasks.

Mobile internet: Back in 2009, downloading a film using the mobile internet was a distant dream. The 2G and 3G mobile internet was extremely costly, good for just downloading images and MP3 songs at the max. Connectivity wasn’t that great either.

Snap to the present, we have 4G internet available on our phones offering blazing fast connectivity. Not only can you download film and large files, but video calls have also become common. In fact, the cost of 4G data in India is cheapest globally and per person, data consumption is also one the highest across the globe.

In the next decade, we will gradually shift to 5G mobile internet which will offer extremely high-speed internet connectivity and will totally change the way we communicate.

Back in 2009, home internet was also pathetically slow. It was marred by FUPs and high costs. Today we have fibre broadband connections offering Gigabit speeds. Hopefully, ISPs can do away with silly FUPs, these have outlived their tenure already.

Cameras and imaging: Back in 2009, point and shoot cameras were still a thing. Photography and videography were limited to cameras like point and shoot camera, prosumers, DSLRs and handy cams. We had bulky camcorders that either recorded on cassettes, CDs or SD cards.

Smartphones have replaced almost all of these cameras apart from DSLRs. Cameras present on phones from Google, iPhone and Huawei, etc. are able to produce unbelievable results.

Phones with Quad and Penta camera set-ups are commonly available. Since most high-end phones are water and dust resistant, they are able enough to shoot in unfavourable conditions easily. A brand is gearing up to launch a phone with 108-megapixel camera soon in India.

Communication: Calls and SMS were the primary modes of communication. Many of us would remember that SMSes were chargeable with telecom companies selling special SMS packs making them the most convenient mode of instant communication. Orkut still ruled the internet and was probably the most used social media site back then.

Well, a decade later, SMS is probably only used by companies either to spam us or at max OTP from banks and wallet apps. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms are the primary modes of communication now.

Storage devices: Though personally, I’ve used 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks which could barely store 2MB of data at max, that was long back. In 2009 we mostly used CDs, DVDs, SD cards to store data.

USB drives were making inroads but were costly and offered slow data transfer speeds. Now, most of the data is stored on the cloud and you can wirelessly transfer Terabytes of data in a matter of seconds.

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