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Lena stood outside the station with one glove still on . She wanted to text her brother . The train was late , and he was waiting at the other end . She touched the screen . Nothing happened . She pressed harder . Nothing on the screen moved . A smartphone is a small computer you can hold in one hand . It has a touchscreen instead of a keyboard . Before 2007 , most phones still had small plastic buttons , and you pressed them one by one . Lena's phone had none of those buttons . She could only write by touching the glass . She pulled the glove off . Her bare finger worked at once . The screen does not feel how hard you press . It feels a very small amount of electricity in your skin . A pencil has none of that . A wooden spoon has none . A thick winter glove has none either , so the phone ignores all three . Gloves made for phones have a thin metal thread in the fingertip . Lena's were ordinary wool . They kept her hands warm , and they could not wake the screen . She opened her messages . Those little pictures are called apps , and app is short for application . The short form became common after the big app stores opened in 2008 . She tapped her brother's name . A tap selects something . A swipe moves the screen . A pinch with two fingers makes a photo larger or smaller . She did not need a pinch . She needed one short message : the train was late , and he should wait . Cold weather can make a phone battery run down faster , and the icon at the top was already low . She had charged the phone that morning with a cable . Some phones charge with no cable : power passes between two flat coils , and nothing is plugged in . Hers could not . She sent the text and put the phone away . On the train she thought about a word from home . Wi - Fi is not short for anything . A branding company proposed the name in 1999 because it was short and easy to remember . Some people hear wireless fidelity in those letters . That was never the meaning . At home the phone had used Wi - Fi , which does not spend the data on a phone plan . Out here it used mobile data , which works wherever there is a signal , and which does spend that data . His reply came while she was still on the train . He was there . He would wait . Lena pulled the glove back on . The screen had needed her bare skin for a moment , and that was enough .
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