Hacker News Reader

Comment by okket | Hacker News Reader

Phones are important but without the internet they are just phones. Even with GPS, you would have to carry the whole world (or a significant amount of it where you live) as a map within your phone. Early pre-"Smart Phone" PDAs did exactly that (with external GPS receiver).

Information wise, Google changed everything. There was a before, where you the information was there, but you couldn't find it and an after, where almost every information you want is easily reachable.

Wikipedia is also an important milestone, but without proper search (just compare the internal search to Google) it would be a fraction useful.

View on HN

I do exactly that. My phone has no data plan. I download the local area in Google Maps app when I'm on wifi, then I can use it for navigation without a data connection.

I personally do not find the cost of a data plan to be worth it. For anything urgent there's SMS or voice calls. Everything else can wait until I can get on wifi, which is really not much of a hurdle, any hotel lobby, coffee shop, etc. will have it.

Most of the rest of the world seems to go the other way: voice calls are rare and reserved for emergencies, SMS has been replaced by WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE and the like, and a data-only phone would be much more useful to most than a voice only device.

I agree, Google is important milestone. After Google you cannot have the original Internet experience. And if Gopgle hides something, you will never find that out.

> Information wise, Google changed everything.

Better to say "Search engines." A huge chunk of that change was already well underway before Google--as a specific product and company--came onto the scene.

That's kind of like saying phones are important, but without electricity they'd just be aluminum bricks.

Isn't that the point? If phone's are significantly less useful without the internet, then doesn't that mean that the internet is the more transformational technology?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com