how addicted are you to mobile ? - and what mobile do you have ??

In over two decades, people’s lives have changed ! ~ just stand at a busy traffic signal and observe people.  Two wheeler riders look at their mobiles impatiently as vehicles stop at Red signal – you see people hooked up and talking on their mobiles while driving vehicles – people require maps to go to places, which they used to enquire upon reaching a nearby spot.

How addicted are you to mobile can perhaps be answered by the usage !  is phone simply a talking device or is it a tablet showing videos, movies or is it a treasure-trove containing data, info, and more of all Worldly affairs, does it provide access to social media including twitter, FB, WA, Instagram and more .. how many Apps do you have installed on them ! ~ money apps, food apps and .. .. and how much of your life is spent on mobiles from morning till night ? – you know the answer. For listening to music, a mobile phone is much more widely used than listening to a radio. For taking photos, mobiles are more widely used than digital and dslr cameras. For communicating, chatting, mobiles are the most preferred form.

As India prepares for a cashless decade, yet another mobile phone company is likely to foray into fintech. OPPO is reportedly gearing to launch its own financial service, OPPO Kash, in India by June 2020. This app, integrated into its phones, will extend one-click micro loans with flexible repayment options. The Chinese smartphone maker follows in the footsteps of its peers, Xiaomi and Realme, who launched their own digital payments solutions last year.

Away, a report in BBC is sort of larming. The Childwise report found children getting mobiles at an earlier age, with most now having their own phone by the age of seven. The average time spent on mobiles by seven to 16-year-olds is three hours and 20 minutes per day. (looks very low by our standards !) Researcher Simon Leggett says mobiles can "dominate children's lives". When phones are always so close at hand, as a "private and personal technology", Mr Leggett says it can be tough for parents to put limits on how children use them.

The survey, based on interviews with 2,200 children in the UK aged five to 16, shows the pivotal place of the mobile phone in young lives. There are 57% who always have the phone beside their bed and 44% who feel "uncomfortable" if they are ever without a phone signal. There are 42% who say they keep their phone on them at all times and never turn it off. For more than 70% of children, their phones will be connected to the internet. Whether it is chatting to each other, watching entertainment or getting information, mobile phones are the main online gateway for young people.

The survey shows a media landscape dominated by digital and on-demand services. YouTube, a veteran by online standards, remains dominant, used by 61% of children every day, mostly on mobile phones. It is the favourite app and website of this age group, used as the most typical starting point for videos, particularly "funny" clips, listening to music, "how to" tutorials or watching programmes.

Moving away, is our mobile a phone or an ornament or something of a status symbol ? – people buy very costly mobiles ! ~ the word ‘costly’ can be a relative term as compared to one’s wealth or say one month’s salary.  Again make a personal reference – how costly is your mobile (less than a month’s salary or more !)

There are so many models and brands flooding the market – considered as most lucrative and costly ones are the Apple iPhones – latest model of which could cost close to a lakh of rupees or more.  Its promo reads :  a transformative triple‑camera system that adds tons of capability without complexity. An unprecedented leap in battery life. And a mind‑blowing chip that doubles down on machine learning and pushes the boundaries of what a smartphone can do. 

Welcome to the first iPhone powerful enough to be called Pro. It is stated  that due to the exceptional demand of the new iPhones - iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Max, iPhone revenue in the December quarter was $56 billion, up 8 per cent over a year ago. Apple claimed that the iPhone 11 was the top-selling model every week during the December quarter and the three new models turned out to be the three most popular iPhones. India along with many developed and emerging markets contributed to this growth.

Apple’s 2020 iPhone upgrades are quickly taking shape and not only do they look like the biggest upgrades in years, but Apple will also release more models than ever before. Owing to the success of the new iPhone 11 lineup introduced in September last year, Apple has regained the top spot with 78 million units shipped globally in Q4 2019. However, even with the successful quarter, the Cupertino giant ended up at the third spot by shipping 198.1 million units in 2019 as compared to 212.5 million units in 2018. On the other hand, Korean smartphone player Samsung retained the top spot with 298.1 million units shipped in 2019, with 2 per cent annual growth.

There is an interesting news that as of  (February 1), WhatsApp will stop working on millions of iPhones and Android devices running older operating systems. Smartphones affected are those on Apple iOS 8 or earlier and devices using Google Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread or prior versions. According to stats, the number of users impacted by the WhatsApp move runs into millions. Google’s distribution figures show 0.3% of the world’s 2.5 billion users are still on Android Gingerbread or earlier. Official figures detailing the number of iPhone users on iOS 8 or earlier are not available.  So if you’re a WhatsApp user and you’ve got a very old iPhone or Android device, this could be very bad news. For example, an iPhone 4s on iOS 7, which cannot be updated, would no longer be compatible with WhatsApp.

~ and there is more on closure !  .. .. … Apple is no longer just closing one store in China over coronavirus worries — Apple is closing them all. The company is shutting down all its corporate offices, stores, and contact centers in mainland China through February 9th, according to a statement provided to Bloomberg. Now that the coronavirus outbreak has killed over 200 people in China, infected nearly 10,000 worldwide, been declared a global public health emergency, triggered the first mandatory CDC quarantine in the United States in 50 years and bans on foreign nationals returning from China, and pushed many airlines to temporarily suspend all flights to the country, it makes sense that Apple would close these buildings out of caution.

It’s not clear if Apple’s Chinese factories, run by Foxconn, will also be shutting down and more factory workers dismissed.  Nintendo, which consoles in China, has said that the coronavirus is already impacting production of the Nintendo Switch game console, according to the Kyoto Shimbun. Apple says its online store will remain open.

~ and if you are one, who can go for a walk, go to temple, be without mobile for 2 hours if not for a day – you are really blessed.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

3^rd Feb 2020.