How the mobile phone replaced basically everything else

Smartphones are now enabling more technologies than ever before, including virtual reality, but this is merely a continuation of a trend that has been going on for the better part of two decades. It was around 1997 – almost 15 years after Motorola released the DynaTac, the first commercial cellphone – that mobile phones started replacing or "disrupting" scores of common product categories, according to Colin Gibbs, the founder of Peak Mobile Insights, a boutique market research firm focusing on the mobile industry. The mobile phone's disruption of other products happened in fits and starts. In the late '90s, phones started getting new features that could replace simple products like watches, calculators, day planners, Rolodexes, alarm clocks and pagers. Twenty plus years in, the cellphone started elbowing out more sophisticated and pricier products like cameras, navigation devices, audio recorders, TVs and even expensive videoconferencing setups. FierceMobileIT has created an infographic that charts how cellphones have replaced basically every other electronic device. Special report