My scary 10-year tech challenge

This week’s social media trend is the 10-year challenge. You post a picture of what you looked like 10 years ago, next to a picture of what you look like now. That’s it.

The results are pretty predictable. Some people are slimmer. Others are bigger. Some look scarily similar.

How about a 10-year tech challenge instead? There’s one small problem. The hardware has become a bit of a monopoly.

The products we were using and spending hundreds of dollars on 10 years ago, such as satnavs, digital cameras and iPods have all been wiped out by phones. Only laptops survive.

That said, the 10-year challenge is still eye-opening. Was it really only 10 years ago I thought the products below were the best the industry had to offer?

Mobile phone: Sony Ericsson W880i

It is 2009 and the original iPhone is a year old. But it is still deemed inferior, by me and my pals in the technologyreviewing industry. The better choice? The Sony Ericsson W880i.

This phone, I thought, had it all. A 240x320 colour screen. 2MP rear-facing camera and 16MB of onboard storage, that you could expand to 1GB with a Sony memory stick. Woof.

That’s not all. The W880i demonstrated it was light years ahead of Apple, ditching the headphone jack way back in 2009. The workaround was laughable, requiring not one, but two adapters.

The phone measured in at 9.4mm thick, which at the time, was important because it meant it was thinner than a CD case.

Less important back then was the ability to type anything longer than a 160-character SMS. Which perhaps explains this phone’s tiny buttons. And why I thought this was better than an iPhone.

Compare this to the OnePlus 5T I am using today and the difference is scary.

The touchscreen display alone is good enough to represent 50 years of innovation, never mind 10.

The progress the phone industry has made in a decade with its rear-facing cameras is equally impressive.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. Apps, wi-fi, GPS, NFC, fingerprint sensors, face recognition, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage. This list goes on.

Thank God those dark days are over.