The impact of the first mobile phones

“Impact.”. As soon as I read this keyword, the first thing that came in my mind was Space Impact. It was a game which I used to play back when I was a kid on my mom’s old Nokia cell phone. And that led me to wonder about the tiny rugged devices of the past decade that had made such a significant impact in our world back then.

All of you must certainly have used a Nokia 1100, 3315 or similar phone at some point of time. They were a craze back then; it was a drastic and much welcome change from using land-line telephones that one had to sit in one place and talk on. A lot of people in my generation just cannot visualize a world without mobile phones. We can only wonder what a paradigm shift it must have been for the older generation to be able to communicate with each other on the go all of a sudden; after having been used to the era of being in touch only when one they were at their respective houses or the person who had gone out needed to call from a public booth.

Along with calling on the move, another revolutionary impact that mobile phones brought about was SMS, or messaging. It is bewildering to even think of how people belonging to older generations could stay in touch with their friends and relatives with no texting!

The most entertaining object on those phones, however, was the games section! Many of us have been addicted to Snake at some point of time or another. The only job in the game was to guide a snake towards its food as the snake progressively grew. The game blew our minds away with its sheer simplicity and yet challenging manner. Another game which was not so popular but which I personally liked very much was Space Impact. In this game, one had to defend a spaceship from all sorts of interstellar monsters and the weapons they threw at it. It used to keep me hooked on for hours. Though a far cry from the high definition games with cutting-edge graphics that we have now, those games were certainly very addictive and had a huge impact on the concept of modern-day mobile gaming as well.

It is amazing to think about how far mobile phones have come just within a decade. We now have smartphones where the whole world is virtually on our fingertips, and there’s no limit to what we can do on them. The borders in communication have faded away to such a huge extent. Who knows how much of a greater impact mobile phones are going to make in another decade from now?

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.