T-Mobile for Business BrandVoice: Forget 'smart' Vs. 'dumb' Devices: The Future Of IoT Hinges On Connected Insight

When people think about the Internet of Things (IoT) today they're often overly focused on the things--the devices that first gave the IoT its name. But like all things digital, the IoT is rapidly evolving from the very early days of simple sensors designed to help manufacturers automate their processes, to the wide-variety of connected devices that record our steps using our watches, and allow us to talk to people through our doorbells. Early on, in an effort to make sense of just how these devices fit into our world, people started referring to them as dumb and smart. This was fine for a while. Dumb devices (think sensors and actuators) were pretty easily defined as something that just did a simple task like reading temperature or sensing vibration and then, every now and then, reporting that information back to some kind of control system.