Manufacturing
Battery: Cobalt
Logic Board: Copper
Display: Rare Earths
Casing: Aluminium
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At least 40 elements are used to make a smartphone.

These elements are produced on every inhabited continent on earth.

China is the leading global producer of 22 of the elements used to make smartphones.

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Manufacturing
Battery: Cobalt
Logic Board: Copper
Display: Rare Earths
Casing: Aluminium
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40% of the world's consumer electronics are made by Foxconn, the Taiwanese multinational manufacturing company that makes Blackberrys, iPhones, iPads and Kindles.
The company employs 1.2 million people in China i
They earn an average hourly wage of $1.78 i
Working 12 hour shifts with two one hour breaks i
Often sharing rooms in dorms. It costs $17 for a room shared with 7 others.
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One in every five people in the world own a smartphone.i

Each of these smartphones has more computing power than NASA used to send a man to the moon.i

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Journalism
Disaster Response
Farming
Banking
Healthcare

Chit-Chat

News of singer Whitney Houston's death was reported on Twitter before media organisations posted the story.i

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217 million

Since 1990, natural disasters have affected about 217 million people every yeari

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Warning!

Over 450,000 smartphone users downloaded apps designed to track Hurricane Sandy in October 2012i

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Agriculture uses 70% of the world's freshwater

By 2030, the UN predicts demand for food will be 60% higher than in 2012

In 2012, nearly half of American farmers were using smartphones to increase efficiencyi

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One third of UK consumers are expected to use their smartphone for banking by 2017

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Banking

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Checking your balance is the most popular service for smartphone banking (75%), followed by alerts of fraudulent activity (59%) and making payments (53%)i

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App Store

Around 97,000 mobile health apps are now available in 62 app storesi

Global revenue from mobile healthcare apps is expected to hit $26 billion by 2017i

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Jon Henley: why my smartphone was crucial to reporting on the impact of the Greek financial crisis

In 2012, Guardian feature writer Jon Henley's Greece on the breadline series saw him visit the country to investigate the true impact of the financial crisis on its people. In this video, Jon discusses how Twitter helped him to get to the heart of the issue, and how his opinion of social media as a valuable newsgathering tool changed as a result.

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