Exposed Circuits Gadgets you can’t live without PG 17
ARE WE BECOMING MACHINES?
PG 19
Tech This Information about new gadgets being released soon
PG 21
Attack Here What’s the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike? PG 21
N O C N
TE TS
FEATURES 22 Attack Here What’s the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike? by S. C. Gwynne
28 Wire You Doing This to Me? The evolution of technology is more than just wires to wireless. Technology is becoming more and more human-like. by Ayesha and Parag Khanna
32 Take a Hike Hackers How to protect your computer, your information and your family from hackers. by Chris Engle
38 Lose the Baggage Why you should get ride of your old electronics and gadgets and how to help the environment at the same time. by Veronica Gyles
N O C N
TE TS
DEPARTMENTS The Plug: News & Info 1 7 Exposed Circuits
The Wires: New Gadgets 22 Tech This
Pros and cons for the most popular gadgets to help decide which new toys you can’t live without. by Ty McKenney
All need to know about new gadgets being released in the near future. by Michelle Kink
19 Wire You Doing This to Me?
The Power: Future Ideas 25 Are We Becoming
The evolution of technology is more than just wires to wireless. Technology is becoming more and more human-like. by Ayesha and Parag Khanna
Exposed Circuits Gadgets you can’t live without PG 17
ARE WE BECOMING MACHINES?
plugged
With technology becoming more more accessible, are we becoming the machines? by Mike Heaps
500 State Street Salt Lake City, UT 84111 1.800.555.1234
27 Taming the Wild
Editor: Ed Hollan
PG 19
Tech This Information about new gadgets being released soon
PG 21
Attack Here What’s the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike?
Machines?
Art Director: Susan Milling Cover Photography: Laney Galbraith
Only a handful of wild animal species have been successfully bred to get along with humans. The reason, scientist say, is found in their genes. by Evan Ratliff
News & Info
Exposed Circuits With all sorts of reviews flying at you from off the screen and out of the books, it’s hard to tell what you should and shouldn’t believe. We’ve gathered pros and cons for all the most popular gadgets to help decide which new toys you can’t live without.
REVIEWS ON:
Tablets
Ty McKenney
T
hroughout the history of technology, emerging technologies are contemporary advances and innovation in various fields of technology. Various converging technologies have emerged in the technological convergence of different systems evolving towards similar goals. Convergence can refer to previously separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and productivity applications) and video that now share resources and interact with each other, creating new efficiencies. Emerging technologies are those technical innovations which represent progressive developments within a field for competitive advantage; converging technologies represent previously distinct fields which are in some way moving towards stronger inter-connection and similar goals. However, the opinion on the degree of impact, status and economic viability of several emerging and converging technologies vary. Over centuries, innovative methods and new technologies are developed and opened up. Some of these technologies are due to theoretical research, others commercial research and others from technological development. Technological growth includes incremental developments and disruptive technologies. An example of the former was the gradual roll-out of DVD as a development intended to follow on from the previous optical technology Compact Disc. And now we have Blu ray discs that render the DVD nearly
obsolete By contrast, disruptive technologies are those where a new method replaces the previous technology and make it redundant, for example the replacement of horse drawn carriages by cars. Emerging technologies in general denote significant technology developments that broach new territory in some significant way in their field. Examples of currently emerging technologies include information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive science, robotics, and occasionally artificial intelligence. Many writers, including computer scientist Bill Joy, have identified clusters of technologies that they consider critical to humanity’s future. Joy warns that the technology could be used by elites for good or evil. They could use it as “good shepherds” for the rest of humanity, or decide everyone else is superfluous and push for mass extinction of those made unnecessary by technology. Advocates of the benefits of technological change typically see emerging and converging technologies as offering hope for the betterment of the human condition. However, critics of the risks of technological change, and even some advocates such as transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, warn that some of these technologies could pose dangers, perhaps even contribute to the extinction of humanity itself; i.e., some of them could involve extreme existential risks. Much ethical debate centers on issues of distributive justice in allocating access to beneficial forms of technology. Some thinkers,
EReaders
MP3 Players
Cameras
Laptops
TVs 17
New Gadgets
Tech This We bring you all the information you need to know about new gadgets being released in the near future.
I
Michelle Kink
n the history of technology, emerging technologies are contemporary advances and innovation in various fields of technology. Various converging technologies have emerged in the technological convergence of different systems evolving towards similar goals. Convergence can refer to previously separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and productivity applications) and video that now share resources and interact with each other, creating new efficiencies. Emerging technologies are those technical innovations which represent progressive developments within a field for competitive advantage; converging technologies represent previously distinct fields which are in some way moving towards stronger inter-connection and similar goals. However, the opinion on the degree of impact, status and economic viability of several emerging and converging technologies vary. Over centuries, innovative methods and new technologies are developed and opened up. Some of these technologies are due to theoretical research, others commercial research and others from technological development. Technological growth includes incremental developments and disruptive technologies. An example of the former was the gradual roll-out of DVD as a development intended to follow on from the
previous optical technology Compact Disc. And now we have Blu ray discs that render the DVD nearly obsolete By contrast, disruptive technologies are those where a new method replaces the previous technology and make it redundant, for example the replacement of horse drawn carriages by cars. Emerging technologies in general denote significant technology developments that broach new territory in some significant way in their field. Examples of currently emerging technologies include information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive science, robotics, and occasionally artificial intelligence. Many writers, including computer scientist Bill Joy, have identified clusters of technologies that they consider critical to humanity’s future. Joy warns that the technology could be used by elites for good or evil. They could use it as “good shepherds� for the rest of humanity, or decide everyone else is superfluous and push for mass extinction of those made unnecessary by technology. Advocates of the benefits of technological change typically see emerging and converging technologies as offering hope for the betterment of the human condition. However, critics of the risks of technological change, and even some advocates such as transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, warn that some of these technologies could pose dangers, perhaps even contribute to
the extinction of humanity itself; i.e., some of them could involve extreme existential risks. Much ethical debate centers on issues of distributive justice in allocating access to beneficial forms of technology. Some thinkers, such as environmental ethicist Bill McKibben, oppose the continuing development of advanced technology partly out of fear that its benefits will be distributed unequally in ways that could worsen the plight of the poor. By contrast, inventor Ray Kurzweil is among techno-utopians who believe that emerging and converging technologies could and will eliminate poverty and abolish suffering. Some analysts such as Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, argue that as information technology advances, robots and other forms of automation will ultimately result in significant unemployment as machines and software begin to match and exceed the capability of workers to perform most routine jobs. As robotics and artificial intelligence develop further, even many skilled jobs may be threatened. Technologies such as machine learning[9] may ultimately allow computers to do many knowledge-based jobs that require significant education. This may result in substantial unemployment at all skill levels, stagnant or falling wages for most workers,
19
Future Ideas
Are We Becoming Machines? With technology and information becoming more and more accessible and common, are we ourselves becoming the machines?
Mike Heaps
W
hether it’s incessantly chatting on a cell phone or listening to an MP3 player, or chatting on a cell phone that’s also an MP3 player, or taking a picture of your MP3 player with a cell phone that also has an MP3 player, it’s undeniable that modern technological gadgets facilitate our universal drive to pamper ourselves. Without them, we’d be relatively non-functional and pretty irritable. And someday … they will destroy us all! I’m kidding. But seriously, could our fate resemble the apocalyptical scenario in the film Terminator 2—when computers and machines and small electronic devices rise up and wage war against mankind? Creepy to think about, yes … but could it already be happening … on an iPod scale? Obviously modern day iPods and their accompanying devices aren’t taking over our sprawling civilizations in a physically destructive sense, but they certainly have infiltrated our everyday lives by making it possible to listen to Barry Manilow’s entire catalog on the go and still have enough available memory for a few Sanford and Son reruns downloaded from iTunes. Okay, let’s get serious again … Could this be a future Apple press release? “On February 10, 2031, Apple will unveil their new iPoo—a fully functional, individually priced, completely portable lavatory module. The days of waiting in
long, sweaty Port-a-potty lines are officially over. It’s time to drop it where you stop it. Drip it where you grip it. Splash it where you stash it. And that’s definitely not all! Be entertained by the 21,003 audio books and over 500 gigs of music from the 1970s and 80s played directly from the built-in and newly released ihaveallmediapod. Watch every television show
and film ever made. Make business calls through an onboard iPhone— using the hands-free wireless earpiece feature, of course! Enjoy all-organic iChow fed to you by the robotic iHand from the built-in convection iOven that extracts food from the attached iFridge. And guess what? It does it all while you poo! Hell, you can spend all day on the iPoo! Tell your friends!
21
Along the fifty-mile Houston Ship Channel, there are more explosive materials, toat it’s one of America’s top Targets. So what’s the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike? Could we be left picking up the pieces?
by S. C. Gwynne
T
Along the fifty-mile Houston Ship Channel, there are more Explosive materials, toxic Gases, and deadly petrochemicals than anywhere else in the country.
24 Spring Issue
he attack begıns in the Houston Ship Channel, in the cargo hold of the Belizeflagged, Singaporeowned container ship Ocean Princess. The vessel is eight hundred feet long. It is stacked from stem to stern with fortyfoot-long steel boxes and looks oddly top-heavy. On international manifests its cargo is listed as “toys and electrical components.” But that’s not all it is carrying. Inside one of the containers, each of which ca hold thirty tons of cargo, is a stockpile of terrorist-planted explosives that makes Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bomb look like a firecracker. As the ship steams north and west toward the heart of Houston, there are no signs that anything is wrong. The U.S. Coast Guard boards the ship and performs a routine inspection, interviewing the captain and crew but opening no containers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which uses an x-ray machine to inspect some 10 to 12 percent of containers entering the port, sees nothing suspicious in this shipment and elects not to screen it. But as the ship approaches the giant Shell Oil refinery in Deer Park, the Coast Guard’s port commander receives a panicked call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington. It’s bad news: The Ocean Princess is probably carrying a bomb. The Coast Guard scrambles into action, but it is already too late. Before the cutters can reach the vessel, an immense blast rocks the channel and surrounding areas. As Homeland Security officials will later discover, the bomb consists mostly of Soviet-era anti-ship mines, originally loaded onto the Ocean Princess in Trieste, Italy, by an obscure but wellorganized group of Algerian and Moroccan terrorists. The explosives are triggered by a device known as a GPS detonator, which sets them off as soon as a certain longitudelatitude coordinate is reached. In
this case, the coordinates were for Shell’s refinery. Today the terrorists are lucky: The bomb goes off just as the container ship is also passing a seven-hundredfoot liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tanker. The blast rips into the side of the tanker, causing yet another large explosion, which in turn both ignites gasoline and crudeoil storage tanks at Shell and causes the tanks’ walls to rupture, sending a river of fire out into the refinery and reaching the far more dangerous pressurized pentane storage tanks. A little more than 11 million gallons of pentane are released, some of which burns and some of which evaporates and forms a vapor cloud, which then explodes with enormous force, leveling buildings and structures in the immediate vicinity. By the time another compartment on the LPG tanker is breached, sending a new fireball into the sky, more than two hundred people are dead. The container ship is half-submerged, still burning and resting on the bottom of the fiftyfoot-deep channel. But all this, as Houstonians and the rest of the world will soon learn, is merely prelude. What happens next is scarcely imaginable. CHARLES DICKENS once described Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as “hell with the lid off.” His reference was to that city’s vast landscape of smoke-belching steel mills, but the metaphor also works for something much closer to home: the grotesquely magnificent stretch of refineries, petrochemical and other plants, mills, docks, silos, wharves, and warehouses that rise along the banks of the malodorous waterway known as the Houston Ship Channel. Over its full fifty-mile track—from near downtown Houston to Bolivar Roads, on the Gulf of Mexico—the channel houses three hundred plants and is one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry on earth, producing nearly half of the nation’s supply of gasoline and half of its petrochemicals. It comprises the largest refinery
As the ship approaches the giant Shell Oil refinery in Deer Park, the Coast Guard’s port commander receives a panicked call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington. It’s bad news:
The Ocean Princess is probably carrying a bomb. in the world (Exxon Mobil, in Baytown) and the sixth-largest seaport. Viewed from the tollway bridge on Houston’s east side, the upper channel can seem both frightening and, in its own dark, industrial Gothic way, weirdly beautiful. On certain days the whole brutish apparatus seems to hiss into action, spewing fire and emitting long, gorgeously looping plumes of cottony white steam that coil around its steel tanks and spires and rise hundreds of feet into the sky. Dickens, who chronicled England’s industrial revolution, would have felt right at home. But as the above hypothetical attack suggests, the channel is more than just a spectacular industrial engine. It is also a prime terrorist target. That’s because it is both ground zero for the nation’s petrochemical industry and home to unfathomably large quantities of the deadliest, most combustible, disease-causing, lung-exploding, chromosome-annihilating, and metal-dissolving substances known to man. The sheer toxicity of it all, in fact, is one of the main reasons the channel zone evolved as it did: Part of the idea was to confine all of these poison-laden refineries and chemical plants and ships filled with anhydrous ammonia to their own noxious neighborhoods, generally away from homes and schools and offices. You don’t want to put storage tanks next to nursery schools if they have the potential for igniting and leveling every building within a half-mile radius.
Chemical plants can kill people at long range, but it is still a bad idea to put them next to residential subdivisions. Back in the twenties and thirties, when industries began to locate along the channel en masse, this must have seemed like a sound idea. In the year 2004, when terrorist attacks are daily events and people fly planes into the World Trade Center to make a political statement, this sort of unarmored industrial concentration is like having a giant target painted on us with a sign, in Arabic, that reads “Attack here.” As most Houston residents can tell you, the Ship Channel has long been considered one of the top strategic targets in the United States. Russian missiles were (and perhaps are) aimed at it. A single well-placed strike would cripple a significant portion of our national economy. Along with the rest of the city, the channel was put on a Code Orange terrorist alert during Super Bowl week in
The approaching ship looks just like any other ship, but a closer look reveals a hidden secret. A secret that could kill thousands. 25
January. Two months later the FBI announced another alert—again Code Orange—specifically for the Ship Channel. It is unclear what the feds thought was going to happen. Beyond their disconcertingly vague warnings, they plainly aren’t ever going to share their real concerns with us. Which more or less leaves it to us to imagine what the effects of a terrorist attack might be. The notion that the Ship Channel is an enormous bomb waiting to be detonated is an oft-repeated truism. Everyone agrees that it is, but that tells you nothing about what happens when the bomb actually goes off. As we roll on and off of the now-familiar Code Orange alerts—only one notch back from Code Red, which means, presumably, that cargo planes loaded with TNT are already winging toward Disney World—it might be helpful to know exactly what it is that we are supposed to be afraid of. By that I do not mean minor bits of terrorism such as strapping one hundred pounds of C-4 explosives to a petroleum barge and sinking it in the channel or running a truck packed with Semtex explosives into a tank farm. Those are mere annoyances. I mean a full-scale, worst-case scenario of the sort the Homeland Security folks are modeling and simulating and staying up late worrying about, an attack that would have as deep and abiding an effect on the public as the horrors of 9/11. If we are supposed to believe these alerts, it seems only fair to ask: How would it happen in the Houston Ship Channel? TO UNDERSTAND HOW a terrorist strike might affect this vast tangle of smoke and steel, it helps to look at the horrific industrial accidents that already happen there with surprising regularity. Things are always blowing up or burning out of control or leaking in the channel—much as they would be likely to in a terrorist attack. (Since 1955 the place has even had its own private fire brigade, with two hundred pieces of heavy
26 Spring Issue
equipment—Channel Industries Mutual Aid, or CIMA—that does nothing but put out the fires and fix the accidents.) The worst of all the channel disasters was the 1947 explosion of the French freighter S.S. Grandcamp at a dock in Texas City. The ship was loaded with ammonium nitrate, the same stuff McVeigh used to craft his truck bomb in Oklahoma City 48 years later. A fire on the ship caused a blast that leveled docks, warehouses, and a chemical plant; damaged or destroyed one thousand residences or buildings; and killed 578 people. It remains the worst industrial accident in American history and led to sweeping changes in chemical manufacturing and storage. Still, major accidents continue to happen. In 1979 the tanker Chevron Hawaii exploded at the docks of Shell Oil’s Deer Park refinery, killing 3 people and touching off a cascade of explosions and fires in storage tanks that engulfed Shell’s docks and the nearby channel. The blast tore the ship in half, caused two nearby gasoline and crude-oil barges to explode, and filled the channel with a twenty-foot wall of burning crude oil. In 1987 a crane operator at Marathon Oil’s Texas City refinery dropped an industrial heater on a storage tank, causing the leak of 30,000 pounds of deadly hydrogen fluoride, which formed a gas cloud. Thousands were evacuated from Texas City, and 800 people were treated for breathing disorders and skin problems. The worst of the recent accidents took place in 1989, when an explosion ripped through a petrochemical plant in Pasadena owned by the Phillips Petroleum Company. The blast—equivalent to igniting 20,000 pounds of TNT—started in an ethylene reactor and created an orange fireball that was described by one witness as looking like the detonation of an atomic bomb. The explosion was heard 25 miles away, broke windows 3 miles away, leveled most structures on four hundred acres of property, and tossed
I was escorted to a private room and watched by a guard for two hours while I read the material. I was allowed to take notes but not to remove or copy any of the information. After I left, the documents were shredded.
debris for miles. It killed 23 people, wounded 130, and left a grim wreckage of twisted steel and concrete. To see just how hazardous the products of the channel’s plants are, you have to read the companies’ own worst-case scenarios. Under law, each plant must make such a report— known as a risk management plan (RMP)—and file it with the Environmental Protection Agency. This information is public but is considered to be so sensitive that my request to the EPA in Houston for the documents brought an immediate return phone call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington, asking who I was and what I wanted. In order to view the RMPs for channel plants, I had to go to the U.S. Marshal’s office at the federal courthouse in Houston, where I was escorted to a private room and watched by a guard for two hours while I read the material. I was allowed to take notes but not to remove or copy any of the information. After I left, the documents were shredded. The information in the RMPs is sobering, in part because the premise is that these areaccidents, not deliberate attacks. Attacks would cause much more damage. A sampling reveals the plants’ astonishing ability to kill or maim human beings. In their toll on human life, the worst substances by far are so-called toxics, like chlorine, ammonia, and hydrogen fluoride, as opposed to the flammables, like pentane and butane. Take, for example, Oxy Vinyls’ Battleground plant, which makes chlorine and caustic soda. According to its RMP, the daily production of liquid chlorine is collected in seven 650-ton storage tanks, and its worst-case scenario “assumes 1.3 million pounds of liquid chlorine [one full tank] would be released and evaporated in a ten-minute period.” The chlorine gas cloud would travel 25 miles before falling below the EPA’s toxic threshold of three parts per million and would affect 1.8 million people. How many died or became
acutely ill would depend largely on wind speed and direction and on what time of day the accident occurred. Fatalities are not addressed in the RMP. But based on worst-case scenarios run by other organizations, they could easily be in the tens of thousands. In Pasadena the Crown Central Petroleum refinery’s worst case involves a “catastrophic failure of the hydrofluoric acid storage drum resulting in the release of 50,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride gas over a ten-minute period.” The distance to what the EPA calls the “toxic end point” is 9.3 miles. The spill would affect 650,000 people. BP Amoco’s worst case in Pasadena involves the “liquid spill and vaporization” of 4,440 pounds of iron pentacarbonyl. Toxic end point: 3.9 miles. People affected: 84,881. While it is harder to kill large numbers of people in the channel area with explosions alone, the worst-case scenarios from some of the refineries still indicate a serious threat to local communities: Shell Oil’s giant Deer Park refinery lists a pentane “vapor cloud explosion” as its worst case. The explosion “could affect areas up to 1.8 miles away” and up to 5,532 people, according to its RMP. The nearby Lyondell-Citgo refinery also lists pentane as its worst case. Toxic end point: 1.68 miles. People affected: 20,100. Though the RMPs make no mention of terrorism, they do offer clues as to how much worse an attack would be than the hypothetical accidents they describe. A concerted terrorist assault might, for example, release the entire contents of all seven of Oxy Vinyls’ chlorine tanks, instead of just one. Chlorine is very nasty stuff. In 1915 it was the German army’s choice for the first deadly chemical attack in history, which killed 5,000 Allied troops in Belgium. A number of other widely used chemicals—including anhydrous ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, and methyl isocyanate— are also fatal to humans. A leak of the latter from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 killed
Buildings Along the
Houston Ship Channel
35%
Docking Services
The Houston ship channel is a widened and deepened natural watercourse created by dredging the Buffalo
29% Storage
Bayou and the Galveston Bay. Major products, such as petrochemicals and Midwestern grain, are transported in bulk together with general cargo. On December 25, 2007, the Houston Ship Channel was featured on the CNN Special,
22%
Warehouses
Planet in Peril, as a potential polluter of nearby neighborhoods. That year, the University of Texas released a study suggesting that children living within 2 miles (3.2 km) of the Houston Ship Channel were 56 percent more likely to become sick with leukemia than the national average. If an explosive were to go off in or near the ship channel, the effects could affect tens
14%
Factories
of thousands of people.
27
The evolution of technology is more than just wired to wireless. Technology is becoming more and more human-like.
by Ayesha and Parag Khanna
E
very baby born today in the Western world has a life expectancy of about 100 years, which means it will be alive in 2110. It’s nearly impossible to forecast in detail life in 2110. However, what we can venture to guess based on current trends is that humans will still populate the planet, as will animals, and we will be joined by simple biological creatures designed synthetically in the lab, and of course, machines. Machines will roam the earth, toiling in factories, taking our children to school, delivering babies, cleaning the streets, and other such tasks, which will make them seemingly indispensable to us. We dont know how sophisticated these machines will be a century from today. Some might continue as dumb machines like the ones we have now, assiduously screwing on the caps of Coke bottles. Or they might be humanoid robots that resemble us and nurse our elderly parents. The increasing sophistication of Technology from the steam engine and discovery of electricity to telecommunications, the Internet and biotechnology can be seen as a haphazard confluence of the breakthroughs of geniuses — or it can be seen as an evolutionary pattern.
The computer is a perfect example of technological evolution. From a basic typewriter, to a bulky monitor, to a sleek iMac.
Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute believes that Technology evolves over time: “machines started as disparate pieces of seemingly unconnected technologies, but like humans, they also have an origin and a process of evolution.” He is arguably the first person to tackle the question of the origin and evolution of machines, eloquently laid out in his book, The Nature of Technology. Evolution is an increase in maturation and complexity, and does not have to necessarily follow the path of Darwinian evolution, which is modification by descent – nature introduces small variations in an existing form over a long period of time. Granted the results are staggering, but the journey, such as that of the ape’s evolution into mankind, can take millions of years. Technology, according to Arthur, spawns new generations of products by using existing components, a phenomenon he calls combinatorial evolution. The change in ‘species’ can thus be quite radical in a short period of time. The greater the number of components we have at our disposable, the larger the number of permutations of new technologies that can be created, and the faster the evolution. The technology eco-system becomes alive with increasing possibility with the passage of time. “Slowly, at a pace measured in decades, we are shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes. Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry.” (Brian Arthur) There is yet another aspect to Technology’s evolution: technologies always capture a phenomenon (like using wind for power), with new phenomenon becoming available for capture with more powerful tools. Take the simple example of the fact that when you bend a flexible material, it stores energy. This phenomenon was used to create ancient tools like the bow and arrow. Today, we use all kind of phenomenon — optical, chemical, physical, and electrical to name a few — to create new technologies. The rules of Technological evolution thus make a strong argument for accelerating evolution. Compared to the snail-paced evolution of the human species, we have to wonder if we’ll be able to manage the increasing complexity of technology or if the dystopian vision of some futurists will come true: machines will become ‘alive’ with artificial intelligence and not just roam the earth but also rule it. Ayesha and Parag Khanna explore human-technology co-evolution and its implications for society, business and politics at The Hybrid Reality Institute.
30 Spring Issue
31
Smartphones vs
Tablets Smart Mobile Device Usage
Preferred App Usage Activities
Gender Smartphone
56%
Tablet
AGE
Travel Social Media Shopping Product News Maps Entertainment Email Banking
Tablet
49%
Smart Mobile Device Usage
Smartphones Tablets
Smartphone
44%
51%
Smartphone
18%
Smartphone
21%
Smartphone
Smartphone
Tablet
Tablet
33%
21%
Tablet
Tablet
14%
26%
24%
13 – 17
18 – 24
25 – 34
35 – 54
19%
smartphones and tablets are primarily used for Maps, Social Media, Email and Banking.
17% 11% 31%
46%
14% 11% 11% 8% 18%
24% 50%
30% 18% 11%
20%
Smartphone
7%
Tablet
17%
55 +
31% 30%
41%
OS Market Share Smartphones Tablets
43%
37%
8%
8%
43%
4%
39%
20%
6%
2%
Other
Other
App Download Distribution Categories Top Manufacturers Smartphones Tablets
smartphones are primarily manufactured by Apple, HTC and Samsung.
Entertainment 11% Lifestyle 3% Other 3% Health & Fitness
tablets are primarily manufactured by Apple, Amazon and HP.
3%
39%
Games
Utilities
17%
Social Networking 24% 38%
16%
15%
10%
9%
8%
Entertainment
3%
Other
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
5%
6%
Productivity News 1% 2% Utilities 4% 7%
20%
53%
Social 10% Networking
Other
9%
7%
Games 67%
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