Smartphone convergence in one picture

Wired Magazine have produced a great chart showing all the devices that have sprung up over the years and are now converged into the modern smartphone. Funny thing is that there are probably more than on this graphic.

Anyway, here is the link: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/06/20-years-of-wired/convergence.

During my time in Philips Semiconductors we pored over many of these devices. I remember early COMDEX  shows and seeing the first Diamond RIO PMP300 (the first successful MP3 player). Chumby was another interesting little device, probing its way forward into the pocket media product area. We even had a special word then for this, “multimedia”.

 

NXP came up with the Web Tablet reference design in the labs in Southampton in about 2006.
It sported a touch screen, GSM, WiFi, NFC, H264 codec and ran Qtopia on Linux.

As you can see here worldwide semiconductor revenues have flattened out since 2010. No wonder when we only need a few devices instead of many.