Smart phones should not be new to me. Though I haven’t owned one until a few weeks ago when we bought LG Optimus V phones, I have of course been around them since the first iPhone came out. I would’ve thought that I would be well-familiar with them now but one insight into smartphones really surprised me.

Up until the smartphone, computers were by and large completely ignorant of their surroundings. For instance, old-school computers would not have noticed any effects at all during our recent 5.9-magnitude Virginia earthquake, but a smartphone could’ve! Smartphones can detect movement and motion and direction and position and orientation: a myriad of physical-space properties which were completely alien to most computers not very long ago. Some ambitious geek could write herself an app which aggregates the accelerometer readings of thousands of smartphones and uses that data to detect and pinpoint earthquakes, for instance. This is what fascinates me about my new smartphone: the potential it offers for physical-space interaction.
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