When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone in 2007 he spent some time talking about its sensors — the capacitive multitouch sensors in the screen that let you use your bioelectric finger as the best pointing device ever, the accelerometer that enabled the interface to rotate with the phone, the ambient light sensor that adjusted brightness to fit the environment, and the proximity sensor that turned off the screen and capacitance to save power and avoid accidental touch events when the phone was held up to a face. Over the course of the next year, Jobs also introduced Wi-Fi mapping and then GPS so the iPhone could chart its location, and later still, a magnometer and gyroscope so it could understand direction, angle, and rotation around gravity. From the very beginning, the iPhone was aware. Get an iPhone SE with Mint Mobile service for $30/mo The awareness was bi-directional as well. As the iPhone connected to Wi-Fi networks, so could it be used to map more networks. As the iPhone bounced off cell-towers and satellites to learn its location, so could its location be learned and information derived from it, like traffic conditions. As devices got smarter, so too did the networks connecting them. It was one, and it was many.

Microphones had been part of mobile phones since their inception, transmitting and recording the sounds of the world around them. They improved with noise cancellation and beam-forming, but they came alive with Voice Control and Siri. An App Store app and service bought by Apple and integrated into the iPhone in 2011, it made the microphone smart. All of a sudden, the iPhone could not only listen, but understand. Based on something previously said, it could infer the context and carry that through the conversation. Rather than simply listen, it could react. Google Now lacked Siri's charm but was also far more brash about its scope. Hooked into the calendar and web browser, email and location, and a bevy of internet information sources, it wouldn't wait for a request, it would push data when time or conditions made it relevant. Thanks to context and natural language coprocessors, it could listen constantly for queries and parse them locally for better speed and better battery life. For Apple, processing so much of our data on their servers and "always listening" to what we say no doubt set off numerous privacy alarms, but for Google and those willing to make that deal, it enabled an entirely new level of functionality. The phone could now be there, waiting not only for a touch, but for a word.

Apple introduced its own coprocessor in 2013 as well, the M7 motion chip. Not only would it allow the existing sensors to persist, recording motion data even while the phone's main processor slept in a low-power state, but through persistence it would enable new features. Pedometer apps, for example, could start off with a week of historical data, and no longer had to rely on external hardware for background monitoring. Moreover, the system could realize when a person switched from driving to walking and record the location where they parked, making the car easier to find later, or realize when a person fell asleep and reduce network activity to preserve power. It could also pause or send alerts based not only on rigid times but on activity, for example, telling us to get up if we'd been stationary too long. It meant the phone not only knew where and how it was, but what was happening to it. Cameras like iSight have been slowly evolving as well. Originally they could simply see and record images and video. Eventually, however, they could focus on their own and automatically adjust for balance and white level. Then they could start making out faces. They could tell the humans from the backgrounds and make sure we got the focus. Later, thanks to Apple taking ownership of their own chipsets, image signal processors (ISP) could not only better balance, expose, and focus on images, but could detect multiple faces, merge multiple images to provide higher dynamic range (HDR), dynamic exposure, and eliminate instability and motion blur in both the capture and the scene. The software allowed the hardware to do far more than optics alone could account for. Moreover, the camera gained the ability to scan products and check us out at Apple Stores, to overlay augmented reality to tell us about the world we were seeing. Microsoft, for their part, is already on their second generation visual sensor, the Kinect. They're using it not only to read a person's movement around them, but to identify people, to try and read their emotional state and some amount of their biometrics. Google has experimented with facial recognition-based device unlock in the past, and Samsung with things like pausing video and scrolling listviews based on eye tracking. Apple has now bought PrimeSense, the company behind the Xbox 360's original Kinect sensor, though their plans for the technology have not yet been revealed. The idea of "always watching" is as controversial, if not more so, than "always listening" and comes with the same type of privacy concerns. But what Siri did for the iPhones "ears", these kinds of technology could do for its "eyes", giving them a level of understanding that enables even better photography, security, and more.