With the transition from analog to digital TV, people are now able to receive improved picture and sound quality and additional channels.

The digital change might be overwhelming to some, but other digital innovations were broadly adopted long ago and are in today’s so-called “digital world” taken for granted.

Without digital cell phones, DVD and MP3 technology, digital photo and video cameras, most people’s everyday life wouldn’t be the same anymore. And that's not to mention the Internet, which has changed both individual life and our entire society fundamentally, playing the key role amid the digital world.

Evolution Of Cell Phones

The life of the cell phone began as an analog phone (the generation 0G) in vehicles such as police cars, taxis and ambulances, which connected to one another via radio frequency channels. According to PCWorld.com, the first cell phone deserving the name mobile phone was invented by Motorola in 1973. The “DynaTAC 8000X” was more than a foot long, weighed nearly 2 pounds, cost $4,000 and was still analog.

This changed with the introduction of a digital generation of cell phones (2G) in the early 1990s. For the first time, mobile phones used digital circuit transmissions -- that is, they ran on digital networks.

But this step into the digital cell phone age marked only the beginning of the cell phone’s success. While becoming better looking and smaller, the cell phones were equipped with more and more features.

Today’s multimedia cell phones include not only short-message-service (sms), games and calendar by default, but also integrate applications like cameras and music players, can establish Internet access and serve as digital mobile offices.

Digital Revolutionizes Music

While the digital cell phone developed to one of our most important everyday items, other former analog technologies were boosted similarly by the digitalization.

Whereas people used to listen to music stored on LPs and compact cassettes, the invention of the digital CD (compact disc) outperformed the previous technologies in both capacity and quality.

With the development of high-quality MP3 music files in 1999 and the appearance of the first portable MP3 players in the same year, the music industry finally reached the digital age.

However, besides advantages in distributing and sharing music easily, the digital technology also caused new rights problems: People being able to share music via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and uploading music to the Internet makes it more difficult for artists to protect their property rights.

Movies Transformed By Digital Technology

The same is true for digital pictures and films, which can be shared on platforms like Flickr.com and YouTube.com.

But the success of both digital pictures and films is irresistible. Since the digital DVD film technology replaced the old analog VHS technology in the late 1990s, the small silver discs proliferated, and now, DVD players and recorders are available in almost every household by default.

Despite its popularity, the DVD technology already is facing new rivals. The digital video recorder (DVR) TiVo automatically records our favorite shows and those that it thinks could match our interests. Besides, the new Blu-ray disc technology could get ready to outperform the DVD with a lot more capacity.

Like DVDs, digital photo cameras are also widely spread. Emerging in the mid-1990s, they quickly outperformed analog photo cameras and nowadays have become an affordable mass product, which is used extensively by people of all ages to capture pictures everywhere and at all times.

Other digital items that have recently become our constant companions in everyday life are the digital assistant (PDA) for organizing schedules, sending e-mails and reading ebooks, and the Wi-Fi-supported laptop as a gate to the Internet.

Even if we’re able to find our way to almost every spot in the world, thanks to digital navigation systems, we can not completely foresee technology’s future path. However, it seems destined to become even more digitalized -- as will our lives.