Started this on 14th June. Carried on 15th June.

14th June 2021 Your smartphone may have way, too many apps installed on it, all playing an immensely important role.

26th November 2021 How immensely important depends on the individual.

Though your smartphone can arrange all the apps in a variety of ways, whether in alphabetical order, or according to the latest entry update or in various folders; it can become overly “app-crowded”.

I have over 400 apps on my phone. How do I remember which app is for what? Good question. I have forgotten the use of more than half the apps on my phone. I have to open them to find out. There are lots of so-called cool free apps to download.

How would you like to have a smartphone call up the right app to the front screen when you pick up the phone? This will save you heaps of money to pay for college fees to get a degree in how to use your smartphone. You could get an MBA just learning how to select the correct apps. The idea is to spend as little time as possible searching for the right app, otherwise it would create the same effect as buffering or waiting for the app to load – which means, waiting. Time is the most essential and valuable asset that any person may have.

This could only mean one thing. Your smartphone must have muscle power – lots of it in the form of ram. My Samsung S21 Ultra has a power packed 16 gigabytes (gb) of ram on board. That is more powerful than most mid-to-upper range laptop computers. That is insane! With this 16gb of ram, comes 512gb storage.

Hang on, hang on! I know what you are going to say, “who in their right mind would need that much storage? And I hear you.

Let’s break it down to see why more ram and more storage is a good thing.

The apps today do more than just a simple few things. They have become more sophisticated, that they track your favourite pages, things you like, when and where you last stopped and even predict what is possibly going to be your next move. Hence, they have grown in size, needing more storage space. They need more power to run possibly multiple transactions at the same time.

On top of that many of the apps run simultaneously on your phone which definitely need more ram to run your phone.

Coupled with powerful, multiple cameras; a phone with say even 8gb of ram, won’t cut it. It slows down. Worse, it “hangs” (like stop in the middle of something you are doing).

Back in 2002, I wrote a paper for my MBA called “Command Centre”. The Compaq Ipaq was the hot device then. It had 32mb (megabyte) ram and 64mb ROM (Memory). Compare this with the power hungry and huge storage space devices (Samsung S21 Ultra). Come to think of it; it was the initiator of the “i” in the model name; not that fruit brand company. And by some years ahead, too. Many people owned one, just to look cool. There were more than “quite a few” who did not know how to use it.

A point to note: at that time, this was a guy’s item. Very rare to see a lady with one. Battery life was a few hours. This meant carrying the charging dock, the cable and wall plug. For more storage space, you would have to carry a sleeve that you slide the iPaq in, memory cards with storage sizes from 32mb up to 1gb. I had two iPaqs, a sleeve with two card slots. Carried a 1 gb and 340mb memory card. All in all, it weighed in closed to half a ton. Speaking from experience. Now, you know why the ladies stayed away from these things.

Coming back to the “Command Centre”, I envisioned then, that everything will be controlled from a device like this. Your bank accounts, personal stuff, phone, etc. Looks like I was thinking many years ahead of time. Just like how I wrote a working paper in 1999 for PALM.

At that time, PALM was the PDA (personal digital assistant). Small, slim, light, ran on two AAA batteries which could last for a month. I wrote on how like minded people with PALM devices come together to share ideas, beam across via “Infrared” name cards, share apps, etc.. Bluetooth or wifi was not available then, at least not on these devices.

So, since there were many people that came together often with this similar interest, I thought it a good idea that this could be done over cookies and coffee.

That particular senior executive that received my working paper left PALM shortly after that. The next thing I know is that a particular kopi company launched that exact idea for US$150 million. Hmmm… makes you wonder (1)

Today, institutions and retailers expect you to own a smartphone. Almost everything, every retailer, call for a cab, order food, airline, hospital, anything you need to know about anything and everything requires you to have their app on the smartphone.

A good thing or a bane, that depends on how you want to treat this smartphone. Who is master? Let me know when you find te answer out. Leave your comments below.

15th June 2021 I read a complaint in one of the main local media newspapers of an article: Many people are not sensitive to machines with A I. Excuse me? Say what?…. Next article.

NOTES: 1. Nope I didn’t get recognition either in payment or any form.