How Do You Beat iPhone?
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I see the author's point, but I'd actually approach a solution in completely the opposite direction.
The whole reason the phone has become the all-in-one do-everything device is that the vast, vast majority of the time, most people aren't doing some highly specialised activity like skiing. Rather they're going about their daily lives, in a very predictable, stable environment. In that scenario, you want to optimise for convenience, which means portability, which means a small, light, touchscreen device that does everything well enough.
In the specialised activity usecase, you want precisely the opposite of the 'all in one convenience' approach - you want specialised tools that each do one thing really well. So you absolutely don't want to swap out your iPhone for an 'adventurePhone' which packs a load of features behind a specialised 'skiiing' interface - that's an unnecessary and almost certainly wasteful mix of specialised and generalised tools - what you do want is a set of specialised tools, each with its own ski-friendly interface, to give you exactly the feature set you want for your highly specialised activity.
Camera? GoPro. GPS? Garmin watch. Music? Ipod shuffle. Phone calls/SMS? extremely cheap Dual-SIM solid-as-a-rock dumb phone. Occasional use of chat app? Cheap, light dont-care-if-it-breaks android device.
Not that small, actually: phones keep getting bigger and bigger over time, a tendency that even Apple succumbed to. It still proves your point, though: manufacturers are optimizing for a stable environment where users are ok with using an unwieldy phone.
Each device imposes a maintenance burden. You have to remember to charge it. It takes space. It's easy to forget to take that Nth device with you. They're usually not interoperable, they don't talk with each other at all - which is bad, because in this case an integrated device is more than a sum of its parts.
People get the Unix philosophy backwards - having lots of small tools is nothing but making waste if you can't compose them together.
Personally, I want a SpecOps phone. Everything the AdventurePhone has, plus more ability to hack it. Plus all sensors. There aren't that many things that piss me off more than the stupid market segmentation games phone manufacturers are playing. We could have had a goddamn tricorder. It wouldn't be even that expensive because the parts are already there, and economies of scale works in favour of less differentiated devices here. But we don't have it and won't have it, because mobile devices are designed with sole purpose of milking money out of consumers, instead of giving people a versatile tool to expand their power and abilities.
I agree completely with what you say - the maintenance overhead is one disadvantage of the many specialised tools approach. But, my point is, assuming this is a very rare activity, that maintenance cost is paid infrequently and is therefore not, cumulatively, very high. If you ski every day however, carrying one tool for each feature indeed starts to bring too much maintenance overhead and you'd at that point opt for more all-in-one convenience. But the user who does a specialised activity as the norm is very rare, thus such products don't really have a market.
I wouldn't necessarily describe this 'many specilised tools selected individually for a known specialised use case' approach as being in line with the UNIX philosophy, which is more 'many specialised tools with the ability to be chained together to handle any use case'.
In my example of skiing, the tools don't need to be chained. They can, and preferably should, be quite isolated in their function and use. They're all completely vertically functional - if one goes down, the others all still work fine and only one feature is lost. It's just about unbundling the completely orthogonal features you want and picking options tuned to that specific use case, sacrificing some convenience for better quality in only that use case.
The all-in-one iPhone type solution is more about bundling regularly-used (though not always used, in each case) features to work across a broad range of more general use cases, necessarily sacrificing optimal quality in any particular use case for convenience across all of them.
Apple is doing here what Microsoft did when they were in their prime. Let the other guys experiment with a ton of random features, and then wait, and copy the best features from the last batch, but make them a little better.
They're also so much further ahead on dimensions like performance, battery life, build quality, camera, apps, etc. Those things are so important, I think they're similar to "being first"
Yes, those Apple things were first shown on an iPhone. It doesn't means that those technologies were first shown on the iPhone
And while I'll concede that things like their cameras are great, the only reason certain things like performance and battery life are what they are is because they control iOS AND all of the hardware running it. And app development on iOS has just as many pros and cons as developing for Android, I don't think it fair to label one as better in that regard.
1.) potentially performance (as I'm not familiar with the true technical benchmarks of something like the A9 chip vs the latst Snapdragon, Exynos, etc)
2.) Apps - only if you include true "tablet" apps as well, as Android has done a terrible job with their tablet apps (basically glorified phone apps for the most part).
Examples:
- Split view and side view on the ipad - Siri enhancements that copied Cortana functionality - Detachable keyboard for the ipad - Pen for the ipad
And those are just the ones of the top of my head, I'm sure there are others.
Where they used to be first to market with their stuff, they're now waiting and copying competitors instead and its getting really obvious.
I do get your point however, Apple hasn't been leading the market with a multi year gap like they did when they originally introduced the iPhone.
No (Toshiba), no, no (Motorola) and no (at least there was one smartphone, Galaxy S3, that had 5GHz wifi)
Funny how then you put the disclaimer about "being commercially successful,)
High resolution displays were around long before the iPhone 4 moved from their standard resolution. "Retina" is a branded term for a high resolution display from Apple. And in the current phone space, the iPhone 6S Plus lags quite a bit behind in terms of PPI and actual native resolution.
Similar arguments can be made for fingerprint scanning, personal assistant, 5 Ghz wifi and the waterproofing.
Microsoft had tablets in the 1990s, but it took the iPad to really have them catch on. Same with high-resolution screens on cellphones.
Android's most popular devices (Samsung and Motorola/Droid) prior to Apple's first "retina" display had higher resolution displays than the standard 320 x 480 that Apple had for the first few iPhones.
Agreed. That is, in fact, the entire point of my post at the top of this thread. Apple is not some magical pixie creating new innovative features out of thin air. They're imitating the best features from the competition (which is a wide landscape) and bringing them together in a single device.
This may sound critical of Apple, but I don't intend it as such. This sort of "trail and steal" attitude is genius, and Apple will only be beaten when they start to believe their own propaganda of being "innovative" and start introducing useless features that they will nonetheless have to keep supporting in new phones until the end of time.
My personal belief is that Siri and Force Touch are both instances of this phenomenon, although at least they have not made it easy for apps to integrate with Siri, so they could effectively remove (or significantly change) that features in future OS upgrades. Force Touch they're probably stuck with forever so users will keep trying to break their screens while they figure out that pressing on this particular thing doesn't do anything.
Out of the gate, I think Apple did many things very, very right, and that's put them in a position where they can afford to let their competition try out new features and only appropriate them if the feature is actually useful. Notably, I think, the "App" model, with the container-based isolation and installation, the curated selection, and the limited access to things outside of the app. And of course, finally making a touch screen that actually worked by being responsive enough that you rarely have to wonder "did it register that I pressed it, and now it's waiting, or did I miss the target?" which was the downfall of all previous touchscreens.
Making something useable is not innovation?
You wait for something you see a lot on here a "paradigm shift".
Incremental improvements over the incumbent rarely displace the incumbent (unless they do something crazy).
If the desktop had stayed the primary computing device most people interacted with Microsoft would still have a complete lock on the entire thing, Smartphones and Tablets as mass market consumer devices disrupted Microsoft's monopoly by forcing them to compete in a world with devices not running their OS.
I doubt anyone will beat Apple at making a better smartphone in the short-medium term (I use a Nexus 4 but that was purely a cost/good enough decision) but I wouldn't bet against something coming out that creates a window, if I had to hazard a guess I'd say something like VR/AR in a consumer friendly package at an affordable price but you'd still need some kind of hardware to run the unit and I think a Smartphone is the natural fit for that so maybe the phone will stay central longer than I expect.
What I'd really like is something about the weight of the specs I wear for screen work, that has intelligent feeds that I can customise for what I'm doing, if you could overlay video and such on top of that you'd really have something.
I regulary repair my roadbike and sometimes end up using youtube videos for instruction, having a small "HD" screen I could have in vision while I'm doing that would be incredibly useful, or the ability to pull up a shell and view some text wherever I am (server misbehaving or whatever).
That's something I'd pay £300 for.
A seawaterproof, dust-proof, shock-resistant aluminum-magnesium alloy cylinder. A lanyard hole on top and another on the bottom.
No display.
No headphone jack.
No SMS, no wireless data system.
A USB port under a lid.
A camera with a physical viewfinder and one button: when you press it, it takes a picture. No review, no fancy filters.
A speaker and a microphone.
A big battery. Three or four days of moderate use.
Two more buttons: GO and STOP. No keypad, no directional keys.
The interface is voice based. Tap GO, say "Call Fred". It slurps your contact database from your iPhone or Android, whatever you use the rest of the time. When it rings, you can hit GO to accept the call or STOP to send it to your other phone, where it can go to your normal voicemail.
It doesn't play games. It has a few minor features, all under voice command: "Set alarm 6 AM", "Timer on" "Lap", "Timer off", "What time is it?".
You can recharge it via the USB port, you can mount it as a drive and send off the photos, you can upload a new contact list. The battery is replaceable. Four band GSM with a SIM card next to the battery. You can use it anywhere except Antarctica.
Selling points: it keeps working, longer and in harsher conditions than you want to take any black mirror. You can use it one-handed without looking at it. Take it with you jogging, rock climbing, or SCUBA diving. It doesn't look like a phone, so it's not an automatic theft target. In a rough situation you can hit someone with it and expect it to work afterwards.
James Bond would carry one, if he and it existed.
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/The... :)
Current smartphones are just iterative improvements based on affordable touchscreens crossing the "suck" to "don't suck" threshold.
The voice-as-UI will come (and such a device looks like a particularly nice match for a smartwatch), but it's not a problem of the design not being tried -- it's that it's still some serious hardware/software R&D breakthrough away from being viable.
If you realize what the smartphone means—literally the entire middle class population with a powerful networked computer in their pocket—and where it stands in the logical progress of computers from government to business to home to the person, it's clear that the next revolution of this magnitude will be nothing less than physical implants. Maybe there will be some intermediate step like Google Glass, but just like smart watches it's very hard to beat the utility of a phone in your pocket.
Other major innovations will happen, sure, but they will come out of unexpected areas and solve new problems. The OA seems to be nostalgic for the pace of innovation of the last 8 years, but that time is over now, smartphones will continue to improve incrementally but the low-hanging fruit for reinventing them is pretty well harvested. Even if someone comes up with a fundamentally better mobile paradigm than iOS it's probably impossible to overcome the network and polish effects of a decade of Apple and Google pouring their entire essence into their respective mobile platforms.
All my banking/credit card apps on iPhone turned into Touch ID based starting this year. Last year this time I had to go through a battle to convince my fellow corporate colleague that the Touch ID is not some scary security breach wannabe like those found in androids.
This is what apple always do and still very good at, show the world how to turn technology into improving quality of average man's life, though far less than what men have hoped and so far is the only one who has manage to pull it off.
What Microsoft, IBM have done at most to affect people's work life, but nowhere near what Apple has done.
The rest of industry would be much better off if simple watch and learn. There is this mindset that's still light year ahead from what most have perceived.
I suppose that you will provide some examples of those security breachs
Or are you just posting the first thing you find in Google withouts knowing what it means?
On the HTC One Max X the fingerprint is saved as /data/dbgraw.bmp with a
0666 permission setting (world readable). Any unprivileged processes or apps
can steal user’s fingerprints by reading this file.
Also, even when you're not dealing with incompetent morons at htc, the same article points out that on other Samsung and HTC devices, any app can directly query the fingerprint sensor.
Samsung and HTC appear to be strictly amateur hour. After stuff like this, how can you trust what an Android phone is doing with your fingerprint?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/htc-finger...
That's my thought process exactly.
I'd bet on Apple, but not because Apple is so amazingly good or impeccably perfect. They're not, not by far. It's just that everybody else is so outrageously incompetently bad, it's like they're not even really trying.
That's how you go out of business and become irrelevant.
Sony's layer on top of Android abortion made it a bad phone that didn't meet with much commercial success. Stock android right now is the most delightful phone OS in the world (in my opinion).. why Android phone manufacturers keep running away from it, installing bloatware, and generally missing the mark I'll never understand.
I was surprised to find how much battery I had left at the end of the day in a major Indian city, as opposed to in San Francisco. One or two bars of signal strength may be enough to make your phone useful, but it's no good for one's battery life.
Recall that the radio power-to-distance function is logarithmic.
This is a solution to the "fat phone" problem - the things are just getting too big.
https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-rates/sha...
http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-sharing
But even if it actually were about beating the iPhone, my question stands. It's an extremely popular product with very high customer satisfaction ratings. We as consumers should be so lucky to have an analogue in other market sectors.
If only, say, cars had the same problem. Or televisions, or shoes, or or or...
I think that he starts with a wrong hypothesis