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.

BillShrink.com has a very interesting graph explaining how much we are paying for each part of our mobile phone service. It take a few minutes to read through and digest, but the results are shocking:

Mobile phone companies provide the basic service of transferring information, whether that be in the form of phone calls, text messaging or internet data plans. However, the method in which they charge for these services is not so basic. By coupling various services into packages and failing to disclose specific details, these companies make it difficult to understand exactly what you are paying for, and exactly how much you are paying for it. With messaging and phone calls, both the sender and the recipient are being billed, doubling the charge on the transfer of the same data. When we took a look into exactly how much data is being transferred, and how much it is costing the customer, we found that each service is each being charged at relatively high and largely different rates.

Take a step back and read the bottom line.

This makes data transfer via
Data plan 225X
Voice 3,372X
Messaging 412,500X
More expensive than your standard ISP

Wow. I mean wow, wow, wow. No one, myself included, seems to take a step back and look at these things. We simply sign up for our cell service and pay as little as we can and still get the service we need. Meanwhile, we’re getting taken to the cleaners.

Hmmm, yes, I send more than 200 texts per month so I better get unlimited texting for $30. What’s that Mr. Consumer? The 300 texts you sent last month equals about 5% of 1MB of data. That’s basically the equivalent of talking on the phone for one minute. And well, good thing you paid $30 for that service or else we would have had to charge you overage fees. You really saved yourself some money there!