The surprising way cellphones changed our lives

Joel Engel, an American engineer who had worked on Nasa's Apollo programme, was leading an effort to create the world's first handheld mobile phone..

But the N95, like the iPhone, exemplified the key quality that differentiates modern mobile devices from their predecessors they are not simply phones, but instead combine a wide array of technology..

"We get more processing power on them, and more ability to put sensors into them," he says.. Hence the early smartphones' inclusion of internet browsers, cameras, location services, torches, Bluetooth and accelerometers circuitry that can tell what angle a phone is held at, allowing the device to automatically switch your display from portrait mode to landscape.This technological bundling has been intensifying ever since...

But bundled technology has also enabled the creation of navigational features that are less well-known than Google Maps, but highly valued to their users such those that facilitate haptic, or touch-based, navigation for the blind.. Researchers have used the vibration capabilities within most modern smartphones to create the digital equivalent of tactile maps that people with visual impairments can use to feel their way around their environment..

The identical-looking rectangular slabs most phones have become the "candy bar" shape, as manufacturers put it could give way once more with a new generation of folding phones, and the capacity for much larger screens that fit inside our pockets, says Elizabeth Woyke, author of The Smartphone: Anatomy of an Industry...

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