It’s hard to be surprised when people talk about the rapid growth of various sectors of the tech industry. It’s hard for me, anyway. That’s probably due to the fact that most of the crazy booms have been an integral part of my life – I was born after the “good old days,” when phones were tethered to the wall. The rate of innovation will always be interesting to me, even if I’ve missed some of it. To think about the difference between cell phones a decade ago and cell phones today is to see, in some small way, the crazy pace of development humanity has witnessed over the last half-century or so.

As is often the case, the BBC covers things best. Michael Blastland (awesome name) put together ‘A Brief History of Gadgets,’ complete with graphs like the one you see above. It’s definitely worth reading through, especially at a time of year when we’re wrapping and unwrapping some of the best technology our species has to offer. As Blastland says it, “For a while, the home phone will be part and parcel of many an internet connection. But will we, one day soon, watch the Christmas comedy repeats and, in a scene when the phone rings – Ha! It’s stuck to the wall by a wire. Hilarious! – wonder how those pre-mobile primitives managed?”

There have been a million posts exactly like this one, posts detailing the most minute changes to our daily lives as the result of some new, ubiquitous technology, but I still get the same sense of wonderment when I encounter one myself. My younger sister graduated from undergrad today, replete with your stereotypically boring and overdrawn ceremony.

One thing was different between this and my last graduation – my younger brother’s high school graduation – a few years back. I had an iPhone, and so did my older sister. My younger brother was sporting an iPod Touch. Within a few minutes we had fired up Words With Friends, a Scrabble app that’s playable with one other person over the air. From a few seats away I was able to dish out some domination while tuning out the muffled voice of an underwhelming speaker.

There are plenty of people who would condemn my actions, my lack of interest in my sister’s momentous occasion. For me, though, there wasn’t much to see. My sister was across an auditorium full of a couple thousand kids. I would hear her name exactly once in the course of a two-hour ceremony, see her face just twice by the time it was over. Even she was willing to admit that the keynote speaker was beyond awful. Considering all of that, I don’t think it’s out of the question to seek a little entertainment.

It wasn’t just me, either. Looking around the room I saw a swarm of handheld entertainment screens flickering with the owner’s stimulus of choice. There were students on the floor checking emails, sending pictures back and forth, playing games, hell some of them were making calls.

The Nielsen Company has released the top performers in the tech sector for 2009. Among the company’s lists is the cell phone chart, at the top of which sits the iPhone.

I know. I was shocked, too. Below that it’s the Blackberry 8300 series. Again, a pretty big surprise. The two most popular phones in the states this year are actual smartphones. Perhaps most surprising of all was the number three spot: the Motorola RAZR. I don’t know if people just aren’t resubbing, so they don’t replace their out-of-date phones, or if there just weren’t enough smartphone options on Verizon, the nation’s network of choice.

Whatever the case, the RAZR is still hanging around in big numbers, but it’s getting beat out by the smartphone explosion. Manufacturers take note: people want mobile web access, so much so that the smartphone sector is finally beating the pants off feature phones.

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If you take a look at today’s most popular devices it’s easy to see the shift away from specialized gadgets to universal tools. The Nook from Barnes and Noble is the not-so-missing link between ereaders and tablets, camcorders are shooting still pictures and vice versa, and of course there are our cell phones, which are screaming toward becoming the all-in-one device of the future. Martin Cooper, grandfather of cell phones, thinks that’s a bad thing.

The 80 year-old has voiced his ‘simple is better’ opinion about the iPhone in the past, and he’s said it again to a privacy conference in Madrid this week. “Whenever you create a universal device that does all things for all people, it does not do any things well.” Cooper’s really put me in a pickle here. Obviously the guy has made very significant contributions to the world’s technological progression, but it seems he’s lost his gift for foresight.

To say that a device that does all things cannot do any one thing well is just patently false. Take a look at computers, or do we classify all that they do as computing? Take a closer look at the iPhone. Sure, the phone part of it sucks – maybe even blows – but the internet browsing is pretty great (just needs flash to get my super awesome stamp of approval) and the media features are second to none. And the device is really still in its infancy. Compare where cellphones are today to where they were when Cooper made the first cellular call in 1973. Now give the technology another 35 years and imagine where things will stand.

To be fair, Cooper could be saying that universal devices can never rival dedicated devices – think DSLR versus a cell phone camera – and there he may be right, at least in some cases. But is that really what we’re after? That sort of quality is just overkill for the average user, and splits from one of the features that makes combined devices so popular – convenience. Cell phone cameras can easily match point and shoot quality without requiring you to carry another device, and that’s what makes them so great.

Whatever Cooper meant, the future he imagines is likely very different than the future we’re likely to see. “Our future I think is a number of specialist devices that focus on one thing that will improve our lives,” he said. And I think you’re crazy.

I was fortunate enough to grow up with parents who trusted me. Sure, they occasionally took a look at the history and cookies on the family machine, but their snooping never went any further.

Woe to you less fortunate kids (or husbands, or wives) with AT&T a-GPS capable phones. Today the company launched FamilyMap, a location service that can track up to two phones from any web browser, mobile or PC-based. Parents can set up alerts and even ping children’s phones to let them know the big eye-in-the-sky is watching. The basic service costs $10 a month. At $15 you can track up to 5 phones. Sorry, Octo-mom, you’ll have to tether a few kids together to keep tabs on ’em.

Via phonescoop