Smartphones are wonderful pieces of technology, making our lives better – and, according to some, worse – in ways, we didn’t even think possible just a few years ago. They are attractive, too, with their penetration rate growing year after year. Today we have over 2 billion active smartphones around us, and this number will keep growing as handsets become more accessible over time.
What are the basic functions of smartphones? Communication and entertainment, right? Well, with the help of some ingenious entrepreneurs, smartphones have grown beyond their basic function, offering a more meaningful usage to their users – us.
Playing games
Mobile games have taken the gaming industry by storm, grabbing the top spot (from a revenue point of view) from PC this year. According to a recent survey, the majority of smartphone users install at least one game on their handset within a week from purchasing it. Mobile games are not only fun to play, but they are a revenue powerhouse, too – the “personal screen” (smartphones and tablets) was responsible for more than a third of all gaming industry revenues in 2016. Smartphone games are not only good for having fun but for making an extra buck, too. The last few years have seen the rise of mobile casino gaming for real money, something players have been demanding for a long time. Thousands of people use their smartphones to visit www.allslotscasino.com and play with its large collection of HTML5 games on the go. This is the most convenient way to gamble: the games at All Slots run on any smartphone with an HTML5-capable web browser, making them the most accessible game type ever. Besides, players can continue where they left off once they get home – they can head over to the All Slots desktop version, log in with the same credentials, and play with the same ease. The All Slots has more than 300 games in its desktop browser version, all of them available for free or real money play.
Civic duties
Smartphones have not only made it easier to keep in touch with our friends but with our cities’ authorities, too. A growing number of cities launch easy, convenient smartphone apps for their inhabitants to be able to observe and report any issues they might come across. Is it a broken water pipe, a fallen tree, or a sinkhole in the middle of a playground? People can simply take a picture or make a video of the issue, and send it to the appropriate authorities within minutes.
A smarter wallet
Look inside your wallet – what does it hide aside some cash and maybe a few pictures of your loved ones? Credit cards, debit cards, rewards cards, business cards, and the list could go on forever. Sometimes the number of cards far exceeds the number of bank notes in our wallets, which makes them hard to organize. Smartphones are here, though, to change this. Apps like Stocards, for example, can help you always carry all your cards around without the need to waste the space in your wallet. Services like Apple Pay, Google Wallet or even Samsung Pay, can do the same with your credit and debit cards. Since smartphones are capable of storing all our cards, along with the prized pictures of our families, they might soon turn the leather wallet into a distant memory.