Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Always On

Subtitle: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future - and Locked Us In

Author: Brian Chen

Narrator: Brian Chen

Format: Unabridged

Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-07-11

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 83 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary:

Even Steve Jobs didn't know what he had on his hands when he announced the original iPhone as a combination of a mere "three revolutionary products": an iPod, a cell phone, and a keyboard-less handheld computer. Once Apple introduced the App Store and opened it up to outside developers, however, the iPhone became capable of serving a rapidly growing number of functions - now more than 350,000 and counting.

But the iPhone has implications far beyond the phone or gadget market. In fact, it's opening the way to what Brian X. Chen calls the "always-on" future, where we are all constantly connected to a global Internet via flexible, incredibly capable gadgets that allow us to do anything, anytime, from anywhere. This has far-reaching implications - both positive and negative - throughout all areas of our lives, opening the door for incredible personal and societal advances while potentially sacrificing both privacy and creative freedom in the process.

Always On is the first book to look at the surprising and expansive significance of Apple's incredibly powerful vertical business model, and the future it portends.

Critic Reviews:

"A swift, engaging analysis of how the iPhone is changing the way technology is integrating contemporary society." (Kirkus Reviews)

Members Reviews:

"Always On" Is Surprisingly Good

Always On is one of those books that I flirted with buying (downloading?) for a few months. Up until last week I could never convince myself to pull the trigger (add to the cart?).

The book seemed to have a few things going against it:

-Do we really need a whole book about the iPhone?

-Doesn't Apple get enough ink?

-Should we really be spending our valuable reading time obsessing about a smart phone?

-Isn't this book already out-of-date (after 9 months), with the coming of the iPhone 4 and the introduction of Siri?

-And doesn't Apple get enough ink? (So important I had to list it twice).

Turns out, I should not have waited to read Always On - and neither should you.

Give yourself 5 hours and 42 minutes to read Always On (the length of the audiobook you will read it even faster if you use your eyeballs and not your ears), and you will learn some new things. Brian X. Chen is not an Apple fanboy or an unthinking iPhone evangelist. Rather, Chen (who now writes for the NYT Bits blog) is a thoughtful critic of the costs, as well as the benefits, of our always connected and hyper-networked society. Chen's thesis is that the combination of 3 technologies - the smart phone, ubiquitous bandwidth, and Web 2.0 social tools - have fundamentally changed how we structure our professional and personal lives. Mobile information abundance, combined with always available digital communication, equates to the need for new structures around our work, education, and social lives.

What Chen is advocating is that we take seriously this shift from information/communication scarcity to information/communication abundance. He asks, what would higher education look like if designed around the capabilities the iPhone and mobile apps, and he wonders how the institutions that do not evolve will remain relevant.