Discussion»Questions»Electronics» What are some items that can barely be sold any longer due to having been replaced by smartphones/cellphones/mobile phones? ~
I'd say cameras/camcorders. I bought a camcorder back in 2012 cuz i was doing videos for youtube, but then i once realised that my own iphone had a better camera than the camcorder itself.
Sales of road atlases suffered for a while as satellite-navigation instruments took hold - but have since recovered as an adjunct because the sat-navs are not infallible! Besides, if the sat-"nag" (as a friend calls them) goes wrong, or you are faced with a complicated detour thanks to the road being unexpectedly closed, you may well be very grateful for the atlas.
As indeed I found only yesterday, less than a third of the way into a 300-mile journey - an accident had enforced the closure of the motorway, but luckily, the traffic authorities had placed plenty of advance warnings on the matrix signs a long way back from the closed section. I stopped in a service-area, and using the atlas, wrote a road-number + town-name list to guide me well clear of the problem and the congestion likely on an official or last-junction detour. Big letters, on a card I put on the sun-visor to be readable at a glance, with the sat-nav switched off as it would have kept trying to direct me back to the blocked motorway.
Hand-held calculator? Printed address-lists or address-books? Adjuncts to the computer or "smart" 'phone. There can often be times when their immediacy and simplicity are their strengths. Do so-called "smart" 'phones have scientific calculators or just arithmetical ones? My LG-made, 4G-rated "smart" 'phone, now disused, includes some common mathematical functions on its calculator, but by no means as comprehensively as my much older scientific calculator, or the one on my PC. Paper records are valuable as reserves still readable if your box of tricks breaks or 'Mickeysoft' et al renders it and the data unusable.
Wrist-watch? Similarly immediate; and useable where you can't - or shouldn't - have your 'phone switched on, or even have it with you anyway.
Digital camera? That depends on your intended photography. A 'phone camera is only a very basic snap-shot device.
Many seem to imagine that because you can carry out a given, everyday task by some digital equivalent, then you must, and the older version is somehow rendered useless or obsolete by default. I wonder if some of such people have so constrained their own lives to accommodate the Very Latest Digital Thingummyjig, they cannot imagine valid alternatives and choices. Perhaps they are members of the Great Family We-all, an organism I formed from so-called "lifestyle journalists" and self-important fashion "influencers" forever using "now we all...", their naive assumption that their own limited, rather ovine, ways of life must be those of everybody else!
Submitted by broadband service: for the record, I am surrounded by electrical equipment: a full desktop PC + A3 and A4 printers, a scientific calculator, electronic analogue watch, portable telephone, landline telephone, various radios, a sat-nav and reversing camera in the car - and I am in the midst of fitting a digital 3-axis measuring system to the milling-machine in my home workshop.
Stu Spelling Bee 