It's not difficult for companies such as Apple and Xiaomi to replicate hardware features — and even to render single-use hardware products obsolete, as smartphones did to handheld organizers like the Palm Pilot.
Rendered almost obsolete by smartphones, consumer digital cameras like the Canon PowerShot A520 were the go-to selfie machines of the era and cost a couple hundred dollars a pop.
Yet they are being made obsolete by smartphone apps for Facebook, Twitter and the like, which are fast becoming an outlet for messages that would once have gone out as SMSs.
Technology makes credit cards and smartphones obsolete.
They survive countless indignities and welcome repairs, unlike laptops and smartphones, which become obsolete almost the moment they hit the market.
Smartphones are usually obsolete within three years as sleeker and sexier phones entice us.
As mobile advertising increasingly takes off on smartphone platforms, brands and performance advertisers alike are shifting their focus and their budgets solely to smartphones – leaving feature phones obsolete from an advertising revenue perspective.
As we greet 2013, then -- with HTC, LG, Google, Samsung and Motorola all having put forth their own powerful takes on the Android operating system -- one irresistible question lingers: Which of these companies is going to put out an even more powerful and impressive smartphone in January that will make all of these current Android smartphones seem weak and obsolete by comparison?
Such technologies, he says, simply became irrelevant to users — he reminisces about his two personal digital assistants, or PDAs, which became obsolete with the advent of the smartphone.
He was asked on the BBC programme You and Yours if he thought smartphones would make other cameras obsolete.
NAVIGATION In spite of the many navigation apps for smartphones, portable navigation devices are not obsolete — yet.
