The Pocket Cosmos

A Special Dispatch on the Coming Smartphone

Filed for December 1999 from the not-too-distant future

Imagine a device about the size of a deck of cards.

It fits in your pocket.

It weighs less than a paperback.

Its front is almost entirely made of glass.

Tap that glass, and you can:

• call anyone in the world
• send them a message
• look up a word in any major language
• check a street map for a city you’ve never visited
• read today’s headlines from five different countries
• listen to almost any song that has ever been recorded
• take a photograph and send it instantly across an ocean

This device is real. It is coming. And very soon, almost everyone you know will carry one.

We will call it the smartphone.

A Library Without Walls

To understand what the smartphone represents, start with the most familiar tool of the serious mind: the library.

Today, in 1999, reaching serious knowledge requires movement. You go to the stacks. You search a card catalog (or, if you’re lucky, a web terminal on a shared computer). You wait for interlibrary loans. Information lives in buildings, on shelves, in limited copies.

The smartphone dissolves that geography.

Inside this small object is a permanent, portable ticket into something larger than any single library: a networked collection of encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, lecture notes, research summaries, and how-to guides on almost any topic that human beings have bothered to write about.