Mobile World Congress, the smartphone world’s biggest conference of the year, kicks off in a few days. Though Samsung’s Galaxy S8 isn’t likely to make an appearance, several new, not-crazily-different phones are still expected to be on display.
With this year also being the tenth anniversary of the iPhone — which effectively kicked off the smartphone era — surveying the phones at MWC is also a good time to look back at how much the smartphone has altered the tech industry at large.
This chart from Statista shows one way of looking at it: Over the past decade, smartphones have made a number of once-popular gadgets all but irrelevant to society. While the dollar value of smartphone shipments has grown 536% in that time, those of the MP3 player, digital camera, and portable GPS have sank.
Still, time has a knack for not stopping: Recent sales figures now suggest the smartphone boom is over, and major tech firms are now hungry for new tech like augmented reality to eventually redo the cycle all over again.
Statista
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