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A new smartphone again? Rethink unhealthy culture of frequent upgrades
Technology companies have not been glowing bastions of sustainability, particularly those in the smartphone industry.
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The relentless pursuit of the latest gadgets has driven consumers to discard perfectly functional phones, contributing to mountains of electronic waste.
PHOTO: AFP
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It’s been 50 years since the very first mobile phone call on April 3, 1973. On that momentous day, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper rang his rival, Dr Joel Engel of Bell Laboratories at AT&T, from a street in New York to declare that his Motorola team had devised a functional portable phone.
Since then, the mobile phone has become ubiquitous. The number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions worldwide reached almost 6.4 billion in 2022, or almost one for every man, woman and child on the planet, according to Statista.
