Things Killed By The Smartphone

Smartphones rule our society. Their all-encompassing convenience has transformed markets and changed our world with unprecedented connectivity and ease of access. On their way to the top, though, they demolished markets and devastated preexisting industries. Let's have a look at some of the consumer products that smartphones laid to rest.

Portable MP3 players thrived between the rise of Napster and the rise of premium streaming services. It's truly hard to remember what a massive phenomenon the iPod was at its height. With the power to store your entire music collection and create playlists, the iPod era brought the promise of digital media to the fore. At the same time, its lack of wireless connectivity ensured the MP3 player's days were numbered from the get-go.

Smartphones offer options. If you would prefer to transfer thousands of music files to a Micro SD, that's one option. If you would rather get your music from a streaming service, you can do that, too. MP3 players' only option was "blow half your rent on this thing, or all of it?"

Cookbooks used to be a mainstay of kitchens. Now they're bookshelf adornments, decorations, re-gifts, and antiques from a half-forgotten time before Epicurious, allrecipes, and the immortal Mashed. Nowadays, cooking apps have lain bare the limitations of the written form.

Significantly cheaper than cookbooks, cooking apps include alarms, timers, tips for varying the recipes, online communities with which to engage and brainstorm, video tutorials, and literally an internet's worth of resources. If you have a cookbook and you want to use it, you use it. But if you're looking for a new dish to try, going down to the bookshop and browsing the cookbooks section is rarely the go-to method of recipe acquisition, especially if you're hungry now. Even many a cookbook collector and purist prefers the functionality of cooking apps to the familiarity of page-turning, once they've tried them. Just dont drop it into your pot of stew. That's still a bad idea.

Once upon a time, cameras required carrying cases, tripods, neck straps, and fancy lens caps. Today, if you have a digital camera with all that junk, and you're not covering a press conference, you're standing on an NFL sideline waiting to be bowled over and concussed. On the plus side, the doctors might find a brain tumor while they're making sure your brain still works. It has happened before.

Kodak built an empire on film-based camera. Its superior quality helped it survive the threat posed by Polaroid's instant gratification. For a while, it seemed we would be living in a perpetual Kodak Moment, but just as fast as the digital camera gained momentum, a threat appeared on the horizon: the smartphone. Why would a consumer spend hundreds of dollars on a tricked-out camera, when they could get comparable functionality from the little camera built into virtually every modern phone? They wouldn't. Kodak failed to adapt to the changing market, and the company's moment is over.

Before Bandai joined forces with Namco, it pushed handheld electronic games. We're not just talking about cartridge-based games, either. We're talking one-game devices which relied on layered LCD panels, like you might see on an old-school alarm clock. (Speaking of which, why don't we see as many of those around anymore? Oh, right. Smartphones.)

Electronic games were overtaken by handheld consoles like Gameboy and Game Gear. Meanwhile, as flip-phones became more like graphing calculators, they started to feature simple games like Tetris and Snake. Not long afterward, a little thing called the internet introduced online gaming to the masses ... and to our flip-phones. The world of mobile gaming was primed for a revolution. Enter Nokia — yes, Nokia. In 2003, Nokia attempted to combine the power and complexity of handheld console gaming with the online potential and convenience of time-waster phone games. Nokia called its would-be revolution the N-Gage, and it was ... just the worst. If you're too young to remember this plastic taco of disappointment, consider yourself lucky. The failure of the N-Gage revealed an unexpected market: people want cellphones that don't just offer time-wasters, but real, console-quality games.

The full history of mobile gaming is beyond the scope of this article. Cliff Notes version: it quickly spelled certain doom for any mobile game devices without wireless internet functionality. With the help of hardware makers like Samsung and Apple, the Google Play Store and the iTunes Store have finally delivered on the N-Gage's hype. Where Nokia failed, Google and Apple would not.

The portable DVD player is an overpriced, underequipped, niche product for people who can't part with their DVD collections. For a time, portable DVD players were all the rage on airplanes, in airports, on long bus rides, and mounted to seat backs to pacify spoiled children who demand entertainment on every car ride. Think "laptop" minus all the things that make a laptop a laptop. It's a TV screen with a DVD drive attached to it, and the smartphone, with its attending tablet mania, has killed it.

Everything is streaming in this post-Netflix society. Nowadays, you can store several movies and albums on the Cloud and access them whenever you want (as long as you're connected to the internet), or you could have each one on a separate disc and hope they don't get scratched, stolen, or left behind in some hotel room or broken in the backseat. People who don't want to watch movies on their phones can use screen-mirroring to broadcast to a tablet (which costs less than some portable DVD players), though it might burn through your data minutes. Still beats buying stuff.