Smart

Smart used to be a superlative, a definitive term for something that was deemed to be clever or marked as an improvement over the subject's contemporaries.  The term however has evolved into a pejorative term thanks to the wonderful world of marketing.  The most prominent example of its use would probably be the term "smart phone."  Originally a smart phone was a new generation of mobile phones that offered something clever, and a substantial improvement over other phones on the market.  That's not what it has come to mean though.  Today it is a pejorative term, it marks a distinction between phones that are deemed functional and those that are deemed inadequate.

The use of the word smart however has invaded the consumer conscious, to the point where our products for the most part are having chips stuck in them and an Operating System slapped on them to make them a "smart" device.  The original distinction between what would be referred to briefly as dumb phones and what were considered smart phones was that the latter incorporated most of the functions we associated with personal computers.  et strangely we have never used the term 'Smart PC' save for the literal brand by Samsung, which was again just a PC with one of the same Operating Systems slapped onto them as smart phones used.  The brand didn't last long however and now almost 2 years on it has more or less been abandoned, namely because a PC is already capable of PC functions so labelling one 'Smart' when it provides nothing different, improving, or clever was a dead horse to begin with.

We are however reaching a point with mobile phones, and some would argue that we have been there for a while, where our smart phones aren't smart.  Not in the original sense of the word.  We have a market saturated with devices that are essentially clones of one another.  Now you can argue the merits of mobile platforms all you want but one thing is clear, Android, Apple, et al under the hood are all made from the same physical hardware components.  The device configurations offer a limited scope for diversity and marginal gains at best in terms of technical capability.  Our mobile phone market is divided by software not hardware.  As such there is no distinction anymore between the capability of these devices - the term smart, has become irrelevant, to the point where we assume any new phone coming to the market will be a smart phone we don't even bother using the term anymore and ask the real question of what specification it has and what operating system it will run.

So where does that leave smart?  Well it leaves the term as one that has been disposed by the mobile phone industry, and left it to be pecked at by the vultures of the remaining manufacturers in consumer electronics to use on their new devices as it was originally intended - to mark a distinction between smart and dumb technology.  Take smart watches as an example.  The term here is used to distinguish devices that now incorporate much of the same functions as our mobile phones and our PCs, although nowhere near as capable and nowhere near as popular as they are still in the early adoption stage although 2014 is being eagerly anticipated by those manufacturers as the year when they became 'a thing' whether that happens remains to be seen - I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't but at the same time I don't see any real reason why it should either.

The point was that smart was once a term we used to define a step forward or a step up in our level of technology, and, while smart watches and TVs etc are making improvements over their contemporaries by incorporating much of the same hardware; our level of technological advancement is stagnating.  Everything is being brought 'up to a level' where everything is expected to be a connected device, everything is expected to have an interface that can show you as much information as it can, even our processors and memory chips are decreasing in physical size and form factor to be able to fit into anything we want to stick them inside - despite all this there is nothing that is really 'new' about anything these devices can do.  All we are doing is making their existing functions more conducive and compatible with the tech we use the most.