10 products made redundant by mobile phones

Ever since mobile phones became more commercially viable, they have often included calculators to help you answer any mathematical problem that appears throughout your day.

But don’t fear, unless you are planning on finding the square root of pi, or solving a pretty intense physics problem, many mobile phones will do the job.

Clocks

Who doesn’t have a phone that can tell the time? Clocks are becoming less and less abundant in public places, simply because many people will happily check their phone instead of hunting around to find a clock.

Watches are still a stylish accessory, but phones have completely taken over the clocks job over recent years. In fact, with wearable tech becoming more mainstream, we could see the good old fashioned watch being replaced with smart devices.

Many smartphones handle the time automatically, so don’t require winding or changing for daylight savings either, with mobile phones even being used to wake us up in the morning!

Letters

You might receive a couple of letters each morning- mostly bills- but how many do you actually send anymore? With the introduction of text messaging and emails, writing letters to friends and family seems like a complete waste of time.

Not only do texts get sent instantaneously, they can also include digital pictures and have delivery notifications to let you know when they have arrived safely.

Phones have effectively eradicated the chance of getting things lost in the post, whilst sending a text message can cost substantially less than a first class stamp these days, making perfect financial sense too…

Diary

Got a busy week ahead and need to make sure you don’t miss anything? Essentially all mobile phones offer some form of calendar or week planner to allow you to plan your year effortlessly.

And as your phone can send regular notifications when a deadline or business meeting is due, your diary will rarely see any action!

Pager

Pagers- remember those? Perhaps one of the quickest devices to go out of fashion in the ’90s, the pager is best known for its incessant beeping tones emanating from the nearest person’s belt hook.

And why have a pager when you can have a phones? Not only can the mobile receive and send text messages but it can also include all sorts of media in messages which pagers simply couldn’t do.

Phone boxes/Payphones

When was the last time you got your wallet out and went to the payphone? In fact, the only use for a phone box has become to shelter sneaky snogs and left over kebabs.

Mobile phones not only eliminate the need to remember all of your contacts, but can also be used on the move. Shame no-one told Colin Farrell in that dreadful movie…

Torches

The fuse at home gets blown, the first thing you do is grab your phone as a desperate attempt to cast some light on you.

It isn’t often that we delve under the sink to find a torch that turns out to be either out of batteries or needs a replacement bulb.

And with the wealth of torch apps available on today’s smartphones, you’ll never have the same problems in a blackout again!

Cassette players

Nearly all mobile phones have a huge internal memory that can store all or at least a healthy portion of your music library, rendering the Walkman entirely useless.

With in-built radios and music players available on almost all phones these days, you’ll never again have to deal with all that unravelled cassette tape that came out at the most inopportune moment…

Digital cameras

More and more smartphones are flexing their ultra-powerful cameras in recent years, and this continued development is making digital cameras less and less commercially viable.

Whilst phones are yet to replace a keen photographer’s professional-looking SLR, more and more people are opting for their smartphone when a photo opportunity arises.

After all, why would you spend money on a camera that requires an extra memory card and case, when your phone could be just as good?

Video cameras

Similarly to digital cameras, smartphones with a good camera can often record at HD quality levels, making video cameras seem like a rather pricey waste of time.

Phones can share your videos just moments after recording it, meaning you can spread the video of your child’s first steps (or your cat’s ability to make funny noises) to your friends and family all over the world in a matter of seconds…

And with a wide range of tablets soon making laptops redundant, could we perhaps even see an end to even more technology?