Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.
Not smartphone, but my dad’s Motorola phone that looked like this: (pre 2010s very old)
Had some weird ninja turtle game on it.
Cool Game I thought, but parents got mad that it automaticaly billed the phone company… not my fault, I’m the younger sibling so I think I mostly got away with it and my older brother was the one that got the most trouble, he tricked me to press the download button.
Dude I didn’t even realize until your comment that I completely interchanged “mobile phone” with “smart phone” because that’s just how long it’s been since non-smart phones were really a thing
Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can’t transcribe a language you don’t understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn’t have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.
That’s assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.
Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.
The early smartphone era was wild. Motorola made the very first phone with iTunes on it for example
Not smartphone, but my dad’s Motorola phone that looked like this: (pre 2010s very old)
Had some weird ninja turtle game on it.
Cool Game I thought, but parents got mad that it automaticaly billed the phone company… not my fault, I’m the younger sibling so I think I mostly got away with it and my older brother was the one that got the most trouble, he tricked me to press the download button.
Dude I didn’t even realize until your comment that I completely interchanged “mobile phone” with “smart phone” because that’s just how long it’s been since non-smart phones were really a thing
Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can’t transcribe a language you don’t understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn’t have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.
That’s assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.