Please Turn Off All Electronic Devices

This past weekend I flew to Boston to visit my girlfriend. As many of you who have flown before know you are required to turn off all cell phones during the duration of the flight. About 30 seconds after the wheels of the plane first touched the ground in Richmond I turned my phone back on. I looked to my right and the woman next to me, who was probably in her late 50s or early 60s had turned her Blackberry back on. I looked to my left and a man in his 40s turned on his HTC smartphone and the college-aged girl next to him turned on her Blackberry. I stopped looking at my own phone for a second to soak in what I just saw. Three different individuals, all a different age and sex glued to their smartphones that they needed to check immediately upon landing. Woah.

After finding my smiling roommate who picked me up and returning to campus (after getting slightly lost), I began to think about what I saw when my plane landed. It seemed to me that more and more people are trying to follow the trends of technology. It seems that more and more people are turning to smartphones for their mobile devices. This is not just teens or adults of the business world, but people of every age and sex. I was utterly shocked when I saw the nice, old lady next to me who was reading Eat Pray Love take out a Blackberry when we landed. It seems that the constant connectedness to everyone and everything is so important to so many. Smartphones enable everyone to do so much. I understand that not everyone has a smartphone (such as my parents and grandparents) but there are an increasing number of owners today. There are currently an estimated 500 million smartphone users globally.

A majority of the general public tends to keep up with current trends in the technological markets. It will be interesting to see what the smartphone develops into next. It will be even more interesting to see how prevalent it is in our everyday lives.

Smith, Graham. "Surge in Smartphone Users Blamed for Clogging up Mobile Networks | Mail Online." Mail Online. 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 21 Feb. 2011. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1357174/Surge-smartphone-users-blamed-clogging-mobile-networks.html>.