Slashdot Asks: What Do You Think Is The Most Influential Gadget Of All Time? (macrumors.com)

TIME has published a list ranking the 50 most influential gadgets of all time, from cameras and TVs to music players, smartphones, and drones. Can you guess what was the number one most influential gadget on the list? That's right, the Apple iPhone. "Apple was the first company to put a truly powerful computer in the pockets of millions when it launched the iPhone in 2007," according to TIME. "The iPhone popularized the mobile app, forever changing how we communicate, play games, shop, work, and complete many everyday tasks."

There's a lot of interesting gadgets on the list that have had a profound impact on mankind in some form or another, for better or worse. Do you agree with TIME's number one choice? What do you think is the most influential gadget of all time?

Comments

Re:Easy

[swm]

with an accompanying huge energy cost

Actually, no.
Air conditioning the desert seems extravagant, but it needs less energy than heating in northern climes.

Smartphone was gonna happen anyway

[Solandri]

I had a PDA back in those days. It was obvious to most everyone (except Microsoft, who completely missed the boat) that PDAs and phones were going to converge. The only question was if PDAs were going to pick up phone capability, or if phones were going to pick up PDA capability. Microsoft was in a position to make the former happen - they had vanquished Palm and controlled most of the PDA market with Windows CE/Mobile/their name of the year. But even when HP tried to make a WinCE PDA which could also make phone calls, Microsoft didn't lift a finger to help them.

Blackberry ended up taking the first step to adding general-purpose computing to a phone. Once they opened that floodgate, it was a race to see who could make their phone the most general general-purpose computer (except Microsoft, even though that was exactly what they were trying to do with PDAs - trying to port the Windows API to PDAs).

The only real contributions of the iPhone was lack of a physical keyboard - everyone else (except LG) was using a Blackberry-style keyboard, or a sliding keyboard, or a Palm Graffiti-style writing space. That was a huge bet by Apple, and the iPhone served as the proof of concept which green-lighted everyone else's touch-only on-screen keyboards most of them were already playing with in R&D. (The app ecosystem - instead of a handful of apps baked into the phone by the manufacturer - came later). A lot of the form and functionality people attribute to the iPhone actually came out first in the LG Prada, indicating the industry was already moving in that direction even when the iPhone hadn't yet seen the light of day.

Re:The wheel

[narcc]

Rather than go with "most influential" and to avoid a lot of bickering over "gadget" (by conforming to the most cited criteria here) I'll offer a few items more influential than the iPhone, in no particular order:

• The walkman
• The transistor radio
• The pocket watch
• The slide rule
• The pocket calculator
• The mobile phone
• The consumer GPS receiver
• The microwave oven

I could easily go on. The point, of course, is that the iPhone (or any specific smartphone) shouldn't even make the top 10.