How the mobile phone is killing the humble alarm clock
It’s a sad but inevitable side effect of living in the technological age: devices and systems are constantly being replaced and bettered. While most of the time this is as a result of an improvement having been made to a certain product, sometimes a completely different product can supersede another and effectively remove the need for it to exist. As is the case with the mobile phone and the alarm clock.
When mobile (or cellphones) were first developed they were nothing more than portable versions of the land-line telephones we all had in our homes and offices. But they’ve since become much, much more than that.
You can, of course, still use them to make phone calls, but there is also the option to send text messages, take photos, send emails, surf the Internet, play games, watch video, listen to music, and a lot more besides. But it’s one of the very basic options that is at risk of ridding the world of a product we have used in some form or another for centuries.
The Telegraph reports on the results of a poll conducted by Rightmobilephone.co.uk (clearly an unbiased source) which asked 1,500 people about what they used their mobiles phones for. Eighty-two percent of respondents own a mobile and over half use theirs as an alarm clock. As do I, and millions of other people around the world.
It took this poll to bring it to wider attention but this is definitely a threat to the manufacturers of the humble alarm clock. Which is a device that we’ve been using to wake us up since it was first invented by the ancient Chinese God only knows how long ago. The mechanical alarm clock was first patented in 1847 and we’ve mainly switched to digital versions since then.
Alarm clocks are just the first devices that are under threat from the increasingly multi-featured mobile phones entering the market. But they also pose a risk to handheld games consoles, digital cameras, and even notebook computers. Hard to imagine then that it wasn’t too long ago that mobiles all weighed a ton, looked like house bricks, and required long aerials to operate. How times have changed.
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