I'm usually checking my Facebook...

I would estimate that I spend about 2 hours of my day doing SOMETHING on my phone. Checking emails, facebook, surfing the web, reading text messages, playing games and finally talking to someone(it's original purpose) and now I feel bad about it. As a young adult in America, going to graduate school and working and attempting to have a social life, my phone finds the balance among all of those things. After reading David Lehr's article "Dialing for Development", I began thinking that this object, that I spend little time thinking about, is legitimately changing someone's life around the world. It's not even the phone I have now. It's the one I started with 11 years ago or an even earlier version.

Was I more efficient with my cell phone 11 years ago? Did I use it for actual important purposes? Why did I want one in the first place?

This article highlighted several uses of mobile phones around the world from checking the cost of crops to tracking high-crime areas and the device itself is simple. When smartphones become inexpensive enough to disperse to these developing countries the effects and outcomes could be astronomical sending the users to efficient and effective solutions that the developed world may have never imagined. I would have never thought a phone I used 10 years ago could be a person's lifeline and business structure. Like Lehr said though, underdeveloped areas of the world have used mobile phone to leapfrog the "traditional" landline system. If they do the same thing to the smartphone, the next "big thing" could be something we can't now imagine.