The end of smartphone innovation
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
I read these articles and everyone seems to be operating from the assumption that a fundamental platform shift is inevitable and coming within the next few years.
Is it really unthinkable that smart phones that you carry around in your pocket are the dominant platform for the next 50+ years?
Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones. Maybe we have reached the end (for 50 years at least), but I think the safer bet is that the next big technology 30 years from now will be something that surprises us, not something we already have or could easily predict having wide adoption.
"Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones" -- yes, so we had like 5 generations of computing hardware platforms. And we began with so premature and begging for improvement technologies (when they started in the 50s) and so large form factors that we had Moore's law going on for decades until a few years past.
Now we've reaching physical limits in CPU shrinking, and we have components so small (e.g. Apple Watch) than if they were any smaller you couldn't handle their buttons, or fit a camera lens, or speakers, or a large enough screen in there.
My point is, just because something has been going on for 5 generations of form factors, it's nowhere near enough evidence to be meaningful statistically or otherwise to deduce it will go on forever.
A turkey is fed every day by the farmer for months on end. But after 300+ observations that make it think feeding is never ending and inevitable there comes thanksgiving.
Voice-interfaced intelligent agents like Siri/Alexa/etc will continue to evolve.
Given a sufficiently advanced AI, buttons won't be needed for most computing tasks - any more than stirrups and a bridle were needed to drive the first automobiles.
They will connect to our brains.
> or fit a camera lens, or speakers, > or a large enough screen in there.
Not needed when they are connected to our brains.
Meanwhile, non invasive BCI are getting AWESOME...if you are a quadriplegic with no other options.
Now imagine we solve those problems, and the first BCI is on the market. It's safe, it's a little bit faster than typing/reading (hey, first generation right). Who is going to be the first early adopter to undergo massive brainsurgery? Turns out upgarding cochlear implants is so hard they are made to last 100 years (they get surrounded by bones and scar tissue...) so upgrading will be really hard. And who wouldn't want to have their blackberry implanted into their head right now...even worse, if we have proprietary technology in the first ones and now your brainberry can only talk to other brainberries...or we go full internet of shit and it needs a cloud server to do anything:)
You'll be needing an oxygenated brain for when they arrive.
Even though the amount of time spent using desktops and laptops in a desktop-like manner is decreasing, it's still a form factor found in every home. There may be more smartphones in that home but in my opinion, any product which is universally present in people's home is dominant even if it isn't being used as often as other options. Another example of this would be the microwave versus the oven. I'm not sure which one is used more often than the other but both are still dominant in terms of their universal presence in every home.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2244/2199183615_c2a8acbaff.jp...
Yes, you could buy a PC in the late 1970s. But they were still pretty rare, and even a freestanding home PC didn't become hugely common until the 1990s -- networking was the missing step.
Mainframes have had buffers put between them and end-users, but are still highly utilised today. And the computerisation of the office was proceeding at mixed rates through the 1980s and 1990s (though well advanced by the early 1990s).
Tablets are cool and you can carry them everywhere, but you can't really work important stuff on them since they are still too small.
On the other hand, even if laptops had very good battery life (which usually is not the case), they are still too big and heavy to carry around unless really needed (ie. for a meeting or something like that).
But an augmented reality laptop that lives in your phone is something people might want to use. Not for gaming, but for normal office work, be it programming or using spreadsheets.
And, at that point, regular users might think about obsoleting desktop PCs and laptops.
And to no small success - they worked out quantum mechanics and a lot of other very difficult problems on this platform.
People still even make games for this platform too.
I could say, "The manually driven, privately owned internal combustion car and truck have been dominant in transport for 100 years, so the safe bet is that they will continue to be." And that is definitely safe bet. But the interesting work will be done by people making the unsafe bets.
I could totally see a smartphone hooking up to another computer for gamers - like the Thunderbolt 3 chassis allowing you to use an external GPU. Or simply when you walk into your house your phone connects to a more powerful hub giving you sensor data and processing power?
Eventually I think we'll socially "shift" to allowing electronics within our bodies to augment our abilities. We can't fit everything into a smartphone and we can't keep shrinking it. We can make things more efficient but it's more likely we'll begin building onto humans. Bodies are bigger than phones.
I'm more excited than terrified about an implant attached to my optic nerve for true augmented reality. Imagine everyone having a photographic memory. I'd love to see more done to store data on crystal - or on DNA.
Let's get freaky. :-)
I'm pretty skeptical of the common "brain machine interface". It probably requires surgery, and for what ? to make people smarter in a world with AI ?
No, i think the main motivation for a brain machine interface should be experience/emotion oriented, And there's a big question if people will take surgery for it, or would they suffice with an external device ?
One such modality is fmri neurofeedback - using fmri analysis to give detailed and accurate feedback of what happens inside your brain, so you could achieve better control of it, and your internal world.
How much better control ? well, there's some early research about treating depression/anxiety, etc. but the more interesting research is about letting people train themselves to reach(very rapidly, unlike years/decades as a monk) a state very similar to the buddhist enlightenment, where you are content and free of ego. Another type of training session has taught people to increase empathy. And i'm sure you could do a lot more, since fmri is relatively accurate and fine-grained.
This line of research is early, and very expensive to do, but the technology is drastically improving[1], and with it will research.
And once you have that, once you could potentially become internally satisfied and happy, why would you risk that with a brain surgery , in order to have somewhat better virtual reality ?
[1]mri's are expensive, but marie lou-jespen is working on a $100 mri helmet
https://www.maryloujepsen.com/resume?_escaped_fragment_=#! "Goal: Replace the functionality of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with a consumer electronics wearable using novel opto-electronics to achieve comparable resolution to MRI."
(Couldn't find anything else really; https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/05/oculus-exec-mary-lou-jep... "she will focus on "curing diseases with new display technology," by bringing MRI machines to every doctor' office in the world."; links a TEDxYouth talk but that doesn't talk about it.)
Unless you mean strong AI, which isn't anywhere close, I don't think this AI rush has much wider chances than the previous one, except for some narrow use cases.
I don't think so. I think AI is just one of those fads that come up every now and then, and then get abandoned for the next one.
I'm calling AI as in "actual working strong AI" or useful soft AI stuff as fad.
I'm calling "AI" as in the thing currently every VC/company is investing in and we see various helpers like Cortana and Siri based, the machine learning craze, on etc. Besides some obvious and fitting applications (like in self driving cars) it will go nowhere fast.
VR has already reached this stage, without making any large dent on the market in the first place even temporarily.
Note that this is the second time AI is promised and will get nowhere (the first was back in the 80s, with the "AI winter").
Still hoping to see some improvement but not holding my breath.
And there's nothing to Google.com more than a simple heuristic algorithm, which can be totally dumb to context and nuance.
(I've written my own, but I'm interested in others'.)
The thing is that touchscreen mobile phones are terribly clunky interfaces. It's much harder to express you intent with fat human fingers than with keyboard-and-mouse device. The advantage of the phone is entirely in its mobility, and the fact that you want a telephone anyway.
If some interface (augmented reality, voice, direct neural probes) becomes a workable UI that is both expressive and mobile, then it will take over.
Smart phones are awesome but by their very nature they have some limitations. The slowest aspect on any computer is communication from the user to the machine. We're slow and the constrained real estate of phones only makes it worse. I wouldn't consider typing all this on a phone. The next slowest is the other direction. So if you can figure out how to improve those channels in a highly portable way people will most likely buy it.
That brings us to the capability question. Voice kinda improves things when you can't use your hands but it's always been unreliable. Physical keyboards on phones are out of fashion. Smart watches are tiny and power constrained. Google glass looked neat but is expensive and again power constrained. It seems to be a serious question of how do you get a bigger device without the drawbacks of getting a bigger device.
Smartphones could be due for a substantial reduction in price (there's certainly demand for that). Not just hardware pricing, but also carrier pricing.
From a hardware perspective Apple must innovate (or have you believe they're innovating) to keep the product price and profit margins as high as possible. However, as the article points out, the smartphone market is mature. There's not much left to innovate in terms of the "hand held" form factor, other than price, or improving on already available features (better camera, better voice control, wireless charging etc).
The iPod provided good insight into "size", and even when given smaller sizes (like the nano), consumers generally preferred the standard, easier to hold sizes, with displays big enough to read. The Sony WM-10 cassette Walkman from 1983 was about the same size!
Size has been consistent for over 30 years.
It must be getting harder and harder for Apple to spin each revision as groundbreaking enough to pay the same price as last year. Android capitalizes on this. But it's still a pricing monopoly on both sides, which carriers enjoy as well.
When will there be a substantial reduction in price?
Does the capability exist yet?
Another place where the smartphone could help with costs: currently great noise cancelling earphones are very expensive($300) .And in general are well loved by those who can afford them.
but what happens if we remove most of the hardware(cheap) and compute($0 on phone) to the phone ? And create place in the app store for noise-cancelling apps ?
[1]http://5gwnews.com/index.php/90-r/670-wireless-abundance-is-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
Acoustics make it impossible to do good noise cancellation using just an app. You really need a specialized microphone mounted directly on the headphones.
Of course the other part is that high-frequnecy noise is hard to cancel. But still Bose does a great job.
When smartphones become household items, visible innovation has turned into small tricks and gimmicks. People need smartphones for their daily activities and innovation that is directed towards low cost may be more profitable.
TV, computer monitors and smartphones seem all to be riding on screen technology. If there is development VR or AR technologies that make it into mass markets, it can disrupt all these markets.
if anything the smartphone will just become. become an everything. it will seamlessly interact with whatever device is nearby that you want to use and be the source point for your data and inquiries. get in your car, it takes over the center console. sit down at your desk and you work is right there like you left it. need to show a group something, point it at a display.
Yes: a) dominant consumer-facing platforms don't tend to last much longer than 10 years these days, b) smartphones only really took off exactly 10 years ago with the iPhone, so it's presumptuous to think we've hit the perfect sweet spot that will last us much longer.
It's almost like arguing the ENIAC would be the pinnacle of computing for the next 50 years. A lot of evolution happened, and "phones" 20 years from now will probably be nearly incomparable to phones today, just like your phone is just somewhat different from ENIAC.
ENIAC (which is 70 years old) had some obvious flaws: it was too big, too expensive, too hard to use, and didn't do enough. This has been true for computing hardware ever since. The first portable PC [1] is 35 years old. It was too big, too expensive, too hard to use, and didn't do enough. Ditto the first laptop, the first handhelds, the first smartphones, and pretty much every other first.
But that's no longer true for modern phones. Few complain their phones are too big, and many wanted larger ones, leading to the rise of the phablets. Phone prices could be lower, but they're cheaper than the phone service over the phone's life, so making them much cheaper won't make a big difference. They could still be a little easier to use, but ease of use isn't keeping anybody from buying one. And now they do pretty much everything; phones are the computing swiss army knife.
We may find a new direction to take things in, and there are some plausible candidates. But you can't use the history of computing platforms to predict future change in personal devices, because we've mostly solved the problems we set out to solve. As we've experienced with cars or buildings, we could easily be looking at decades of incremental change.
Citation needed. Although the addition of "these days" doesn't let us check any historical precedent, as makes the claim more like "it might have been different in the past, but from now on dominant consumer-facing platforms don't tend to last much longer than 10 years".
>smartphones only really took off exactly 10 years ago with the iPhone, so it's presumptuous to think we've hit the perfect sweet spot that will last us much longer.
That's irrelevant, since smartphones are just the continuation of computing platforms, so they herald back to ENIAC's time too. They are more portable computer in essence (that also takes calls -- which are now of course digitally communicated) than some novel technology.
>It's almost like arguing the ENIAC would be the pinnacle of computing for the next 50 years.
At the moment ENIAC has developed everybody knew it was early days, and tons of innovations unexploited for improvement. Heck, computing hadn't even hit the market much yet, it was all research work.
Today we already have exhausted Moore's law, and we're near physical limitations for further shrinking. It's as if people don't understand that innovations in platforms are S curved such that one see more improvement in a platform before it plateaus, before all the low hanging fruits have been implemented, and further research yields marginal returns for very expensive costs.
> Is it really unthinkable that smart phones that you carry around in your
pocket are the dominant platform for the next 50+ years?
Extrapolating to massive improvements in computing power per watt, and the main question is still: are augmented reality UIs and neural interfaces better at snapchat and poop emojis?
For consumers (not necessarily business use cases) you shouldn't have to pull your phone out every time you need direction, make a phone call, check your email, listen to a song etc...
Who said user friendliness is some inevitability?
Some tasks (if not all) have some inherent complexity.
Even if we had strong AI, we'd just delegate the tasks to it to handle -- we wouldn't reduce the complexity of handling them ourselves, we have just bypassed it.
https://medium.com/time-dorks/the-distraction-free-iphone-or...
Nobody knows the future, and maybe phones really are the end of the line for computing form factors, but I doubt it - there are too many problems with phones. Tiny, hard to read screens; poor battery life; fragile and easy to break, etc.
They certainly won't go away, because not even mainframes have completely disappeared, but they're already not the hot new thing, and the more time goes by the more people will be looking for shiny new devices.
This this may be in danger of going into pedantic territory, I don't feel this is true at all. The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected.
In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point.
I still remember a day in 1994 when I played Chess over the Internet with someone in South Africa - thinking that holy crap, the world we had been dreaming and talking about for 10 years finally was coming true.
It's almost guaranteed that somewhere out there, the next big thing is incubating amongst a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next best thing. It's just that most of humanity thinks they're crazy geeks.
That's what it was like with the Internet. I got on it in 1994 and couldn't convince anyone else it was worth paying attention to. By 1995, gifted & talented enrichment programs were starting to suggest all their students check it out. By 1996, I could convince my parents to pay for it. By 1998 a bunch of our family friends were putting their life savings into dot-coms.
I think the things that are going to get distributed in the next decade have already been invented and are just waiting to get organized. Much like the dotcom boom for that matter. Shopping online? So silly! People say that software is eating the world, but it's more like that software and the world is struggling to catch up with the opportunities provided by hardware.
* Bitcoin
* Self driving vehicles
Probably others too. The scale that we're talking about is ~1000s of people, not millions. This doesn't even register in the news media - hell, HN probably has close to a few thousand people online at any given time, and there are 1000s of forums like Hacker News on the Internet.
I gained internet access via my midwestern college in 1991. Within a few weeks, I was a regular on a MUD hosted somewhere in Bavaria, chatting (and arguing) with Israelis about middle eastern politics on newsgroups, and had (very slow) shell access on a system in Taipei thanks to a woman there I was flirting with. There was no question this was the future. The only question was: would this be limited to corporations, academia, and interested geeks? Or would this ever hit the general public? Considering the state of the interfaces in 1991, I vaugely remember I assumed it would be geek-only for a while, though I did my part in getting my non-technical friends online. Largely for the selfish reason of wanting them to have email so I didn't have to use the telephone as much.
As a 14yo in 1994 I knew the internet was going to be huge the first time I the amount of porn that was already available.
I'd like to say this was some incredible insight into human nature but it really wasn't, I was around when VHS became popular (just) and remembered that the reason my father had wanted one had very little to do with the stated goal of "You can record your soaps when you are at work dear" and rather more to do with the VHS collection in the top drawer of the unit in my parents room.
I grew up reading Cyberpunk (the good and the bad) and I wanted the cyberspace from the books but I was willing to settle for 256 color boobs at 14.
Also, distinct from BBS culture, many people in 1990 had telenet[1] access (not telnet) from local dialups and could connect to computers all over the country in that fashion.
> The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected.
That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though.
(On a separate note - I'm curious, do you recall if they thought it was going to be "a network for anyone and everyone"?)
I remember when the web started becoming popular and that there was a lot of discussion about whether it would be passing fad, so it was far from obvious to a lot of people then.
Yes, but it's the same kind of "fairly small subset of people" that today would frequent a place like HN.
So if today's devs and engineers don't think there'll be much in smartphone innovation, then it's like people in BBS in the 80s not believing in a networked future.
There were probably many more things predicted by various niche groups, just selectively looking at the few correct ones later does not mean that the overall prediction success ratio is high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
One of the primary drivers of the various government bills was the notion that networks would be enormously beneficial economically.
People had a pretty clear idea that a global network would be a big deal.
But in 1965, when there was a viable path to scaling the technology, Moore predicted moore's law and personal computers being sold next to cosmetics: http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82372000/jpg...
>> whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people
Most people ? sure. But there are enough people to see a coarse vision of the future, or at least reasonable guesses.
In the immediate future (e.g. in 2007 when the iPhone appeared) no. But everybody though mobile phones will ultimately be little computers -- even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones.
>* In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world.*
And he was right. Though he never really said it, it was more of a misattribution of a quote by another, "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country."
Which, if you think of it, is how Cloud computing works. Sure, there are not 5 computers -- but a huge part of the internet traffic is from 5 services and their data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc).
>In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later.
People expected and talked of such a thing since the 50s and communication satellites.
Heck, it was the main theme in books like Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement.
Actually, Windows Mobile was the market leader for a while after PalmOS development fell behind and people gave up on Palm. I had to do a market analysis once and there were a couple hundred different models of WM 5.x / 6.0 devices, if I recall correctly. (As an aside, Google really should have foreseen Android's eventual fragmentation problem since WM had it in spades a decade earlier.)
And, unlike the current market leaders for smartphone OSes, Windows Mobile had the same open model as desktop Windows: no app store or walled garden, just compile your app and load it onto the phone and it would run.
So, not so crappy after all.
From the openness aspect no. From any aspect that actually matters while using a device, yes.
Back then you had all manner of form factors.
HTC got big acting as the white box producer for a number of brands. And the range included devices with swivel hinge keyboards.
I think the capacitive touch screen has been more of a tradeoff that people want to admit.
Uh, where were you in 2005? While the final form factor was unknown then, I think there was a ton of realization that carrying around all these different devices (cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, ...) was a total pain in the ass and that device convergence was coming.
Nah, taking buttons away is mostly about keeping the SKUs down. As now they do not have to develop as many regional variants. Just slap another OSK together along with a barebones translation and call it a day.
I was in design school at the time and we did an exercise to redesign the phone and we ended up describing something almost exactly like the iPhone. It follows naturally from "mobile phones exist" + "laptops exist" + "interaction design makes things better".
It's just that Apple was the only company that really believed in all three of those things, and was willing to put billions of dollars behind getting it into production.
But to say it couldn't have been predicted was wrong. Conventional wisdom amongst business people at the time was that design doesn't matter, except to make your product pretty after it is specced. But the design community knew. We were just having a hard time convincing anyone to listen to us.
Do you remember that at the time most tech companies weren't even hiring interaction designers? You had to convince a company that they even needed you. "Why do we need you? The programmers write the code and the graphic designer makes it look good."
Ah! You're talking about global warming :)
The IBM quote has no apparent basis in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attrib...
And you're entirely wrong about 1990. Plenty of people thought there would be a global network. The WELL started in 1985, and plenty in that community had good notions about the future. The initial work on the Internet goes back to the 1970s, and many there too understood where it was going:
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
So if you're going to use the past to predict the future, please at least use some actual past, rather than one you make up to justify your notions.
I always wonder if people predicting the future also thought that the internet would be so casually rude.
I'd point to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey for numerous aspects of technology, including talking computer interfaces, tablet computers, and voice communications.
Vannevar Bush, in the 1940s, and H.G. Wells, in the 1930s, were proposing systems markedly similar to contemporary Internet-based systems.
Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975) featured an all-in-one, solid-state, "Minisec", indistinguishable from a contemporary smartphone: pocket computer, communicator, video and audio recording device (along with ubiquitous appearances of people who were recording their entire lives with them, much to the annoyance of those about them).
Also a run-in with a global surveillance secretariat, of sorts.
There's "Ender's Game", the original novella (1977), which featured a Usenet (or Reddit)-like online communications forum ... used to manipulate global political discourse.
The one element missing from most early formulations of a universal global computer network were the commercialisation and advertising-oriented nature of these, as their primary means of monetisation and economic support.
Huh? It seemed pretty obvious to me in 2005 that phones (which were still getting more sophisticated) and handheld PCs would eventually merge. And this isn't bragging - it just seemed like the logical thing to happen.
Phones were changing more rapidly then than they are now..
The people that worked on it certainly had dreams about it. But those dreams might not necessarily have come true exactly.
And there are a lot of people out there dreaming about technologies that will never come true/or are still more far off than believed. Currently VR and autonomous cars are seen as the next big thing, however so were wearables like smartwatches.
http://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-wo...
- it's small, maybe 3"
- it's super light
- still feels substantial when you do hold it though
- has basic functions (call, text, alarm) but with updated modern interface
- max 3 apps if you reaally can't get away without them (e.g. whatsapp)
- sophisticated non-intrusive tech embedded (e.g. Track if lost phone, able to take dictation)
- fiercely anti-snoop
- super robust, will be fine even if thrown over cliff, chewed by toddler, stamped on et cetra
Edit: formatting
We landed on the same idea of a less distracting phone, 4" screen, 4G support, and more privacy than existing smart phones.
You can check it out here if you'd like. Curious to hear what you think. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/siempo/the-phone-for-hu...
But okay, my opinion as a random consumer. I apologise if I’ve misread anything.
You say that the phone is human-centric, but my first impression is that it looks very millennial. There’s a lot of mindfulness going on such as hitting the pause button and rescheduling tasks. The Kickstarter blurb also mentioned that new features will be added, like popular app compatibility. So for me, this phone is still a smartphone but with a specific flow to reduce distractions and build good habits. And that is fine!
But if I’m honest, I probably won’t get it. I’m not bright (definitely not HN level), but my mind is devious. It’s what makes me such a good procrastinator, and no productivity app or technique works for me. It took me a while to realise that to address this problem, I have to really introspect myself, at all times, and adjust my workflow to it. As I get better, even if tiny and slow, I feel accomplished as a person. This, not the phone’s good-habit-designed flow, is empowering.
If there’s going to be a dumb phone, then it has to assume that its users are like that already. That rather than a phone to organise their lives, it’s one that they can forget about until they really need it. Let this drive your design and then do the Apple thing: go radical and make the design so irresistible that these users are like Hell yeah, this is what I WANT. (Rather than need.)
But! I am a random consumer, comfortable with spending Saturday afternoons in my armchair. My fully stocked iPhone SE makes me a tad hypocritical too. Stepping out of my analytical/cynical zone, actually the Kickstarter looks really good, and clearly there is great interest in it. I wish you the very best luck :)
Not sure if "find my phone" can ever be compatible with "fiercely anti-snoop". At least, you'll need to provide (and secure) your own server.
I want to clarify that in my parent post, I was only brainstorming the ideal features of a (not necessarily cheap) sophisticated dumb phone, from my perspective.
Other people may have different basic needs – I suggested in a later post (probably nested at the bottom now) that perhaps a modular approach could be a workaround; the customer can opt to add (program in) extra features to this most basic phone, if they so wish to.
As some of you have noticed, there are contradictions in my wish list, but that’s OK – if this idea is to be taken further, then for sure there will be many iterations before the optimum design can be found. There’ll be some compromises, but I’m confident that with our current (and future) technologies, ticking off that list may not be as hard as it sounds.
The way I see it, this new kind of phone doesn’t really belong to the general trend: decades ago, we started with really dumb, clunky phones, then gradually phones get more sophisticated to the extent that most of our lives are centred around it – the trend is almost logical and linear, and you can reasonably anticipate the next generation.
But this one is more like a niche branching off it. As some of you have pointed out, why not just get a basic phone and make sure that you don’t bloat it? Completely valid point. But I’m a typical millennial: I want control and minimalism, but I also want it to be pretty. You know, a ruthlessly stripped down phone, combined with sensitively designed UX, Apple aesthetics and a swish of 2020 originality. And super-powers, like advanced voice recognition, materials, encryption and so on. Yeah it’ll be cheap …
This phone is defined JUST phone. It’s a new philosophy, where it bypasses the overwhelming mass of technology options today by just sticking to the fundamental purpose of the tool, and keeps covering your ass in emergencies. It’s an OCD-ish dream of a lifestyle, where you are in control, in the moment, while remaining chic. You can call it a new vanity if you like.
Constant crashes, hangups, it takes 5 minutes to power on. I'm not alone, the internet is filled with people having the same issues. The updates to newer android versions made everything even worse. Worst phone ever, and I bought it because os the astroturfing on the internet.
That supports Android 7.1 on lots of devices the manufacturers don't (I have it on a 1st-generation Moto G).
Standard update. I'm not in US though. Maybe Lenovo is releasing the update progressively.
I used a "moto fone" (motorola F3)[1] until one year ago, when the last one I had died.
It is a fantastic size and form factor and I liked it so much I accepted the downside of no smart features at all.
I would love an updated version of this phone.
Even the "we sell everything known to man related to phones" shops on Harwin Rd. here in Houston had never heard of it.
Had to laugh when I recently found the pictures from when my wife bought me an original iPhone back in 2007. Next to the iPhone box is my F3 lying on my desk. Talk about transition.
- Fairly small (around 4" though) - Fairly light (not "super" though) - Quite robust, partially due to plastic case and glass front not fully reaching edges - Acceptable performance with really cheap hardware - All basic apps, including WhatsApp (not sure how long it will still be supported though)
About snooping, I think you can disable almost all feedback to MS in WP8, and third-party apps don't stand a chance because they're heavily isolated and inter-app communication as well as global OS features are extremely limited yet, as opposed W10 or other modern mobile OS'.
If you really don't care about latest features and lots of apps, then getting a second-hand Nokia Lumia might be interesting for you.
What does that even mean? You say it as if it were an end unto itself. You don't even mention a single usecase. Without that, how is that different from saying "general purpose computer" or "turing complete language"? Or dirt. If you have no uses for it, might as well carry an sdcard with a minecraft savefile. It is turing complete.
More, you say it as if the AI itself would do things (what?), not you.
Thinking about it, we are high end intelligence without predefined use cases. And we walk around full of purpose, perfectly happy just existing for a while.
You can easily see conflicts in the requirements of having it cheap, but at the same time: indestructible touchscreen (costs $$$); long lasting battery (with a powerful enough CPU, it's $$$ again); GPS ($$$); 3G ($$$); super light (regular plastic won't do, therefore: $$$); etc, etc, etc.
The alternative is to have something very cheap and configurable, in other words, something a bit more than minimal. This is not really different from basic Android devices, so you can already get this (as pointed out) installing custom Android versions.
Edit: expanded concepts.
Have you seen John's Phones?
I guess in the end even "minimalist" products can be lusted over and collected...
- pre-installed basic text phrases e.g. I'm home, Stuck in traffic
- loving the bevel-less displays of Samsung Edges
On second thoughts, voice command should be really be a primary function.
By small, light but substantial I mean a slightly weighted credit card which is 3 cm thick, less rounded (Sony aesthetics) and cool to touch.
I get the clash between tracking and privacy. Hmm.
Aha. I'm thinking of a modular model: you can start with the very basic but slick-looking dumb phone, then customise your own level of privacy and functions, pick-n-mix style. I should think that it wouldn't be that labour-intensive today; plug in a basic model to a special computer, select and pay for the features you want and get the phone re-programmed.
Any piqued companies reading this, don't forget my commission ;))
Sort of like a clunkier app store?
For example, the phone can start off as really dumb. It is so dumb that it's also very anti-hack: no third-party apps to access some of your data, no camera or Evernote to record your moments, no GPS to track your location and so on.
But different users have different needs. Maybe a 12MP camera is absolutely essential for some - so add a camera function. Maybe some really need Whatsapp to keep in touch with family and friends - so add Whatsapp. But all that comes at an extra cost and effort. This means that users have to very consciously decide what they actually need for their phones.
3G, Android, Tethering, apps, $20. Perfect.
Compare that to something like Snap's Spectacles which basically took Glass's best use - hands free first person video recording - but use a sensible button-based interface, cost $130 and are sunglasses which are totally socially acceptable.
I think people are also more willing to wear crazy things on their heads when the do actually offer something new and innovative, e.g. the Vive or Hololens. Nobody is saying "OMG nobody is going to wear the Hololens in public; you'll look like a total arse". They're saying "Woah Hololens actually does good AR for the first time ever."
Now AR done correctly where it seamlessly blends into our daily life and it's unobtrusive that's going to be revolutionary like the smartphone revolution was. Thus the company or inventor that comes up with the best UX in this regards is going to be the next Apple I think!
It's almost as hard to consumerise the latter as the former. You really need to improve component density and power efficiency by an order of magnitude or two to make AR portable and useful, and that's not an easy thing to do.
It's also much easier to consumerise voice/haptic AI than display-in-your-eye AR.
There are plenty of applications where voice/haptic gives a better consumer experience. I think that was supposed to be the point of Apple's Watch. The product launched too early without the AI support it needed, so it ended looking like a rather pointless wrist terminal/failed fashion accessory.
But it's not hard to imagine Watch becoming a much smarter on-wrist assistant with links to phone and desktop.
The real shift won't be to AR, which is barely a display technology, but to a SmartOS model, where there's a single unified cloud and compute OS that stores personal data and projects, and can be accessed using a variety of mobile and static hardware endpoints.
The problem in the industry now is smallthink Balkanisation. We have too much nostalgia for the Internet business culture of 2000, with too much emphasis on developing incompatible market enclosures to monetise advertising eyeballs and encourage content sales. There's too little interest in bringing it all together to give users new ways to invent cool stuff.
With brain-computer interfaces, we are still in the very early research phase.
With AR, we are building first real products. We have been steadily increasing component density and power efficiency for decades, so if that is the problem of AR, then AR is just around the corner.
I hope that current smartphone generation will be able to sustain longer, I don't like buying new things every 2-3 years.
(Not a bad idea to put a bumper on it, though, because the aluminum is wimpy as hell compared to the proper steel on the 4S - I've already had to take a file to my SE after a drop from waist height onto bathroom tile. Look out for the screen, too; mine chipped in a few places from a foot or two drop onto asphalt. Better hardware and it can run iOS 10 without flinching, but physically less robust, so don't expect you can get away with slinging it around the way you can with a 4S.)
I think 5 years is a pretty good run, and it seems like the standard now.
If you bought your 4s 2 years ago, that's on you. If you're buying your phones used, then it's in your best interest to not buy a phone that's already 3 years old.
- physical buttons for shooting
- physical buttons for volume
- back cover should be e-ink for light notification or reading books in the train without killing autonomy
- and of course the windows/ubuntu convergence that could - or could not - come one day
edit:
I see http://www.inkcase.com/en.html refactors the idea of an e-ink smartphone into a case with an e-ink panel.
And http://www.onyx-international.com.cn/index.php/en/boox-produ... tried the whole e-ink only screen.
Seriously smartphone manufacturers, stop trying to shave 3 yoctometers off the thickness every 6 months and give me a phone that is thicker but has a battery that lasts a reasonable amount of time and cycles less deeply so it has a longer life.
4 - 1420 mAh
4s - 1432 mAh
5 - 1440 mAh
5s - 1570 mAh
6 - 1810 mAh
6s - 1715 mAh
7 - 1960 mAh
It dipped a bit from 6 to 6s but other than that they have been consistently increasing battery capacity.
(Btw, plus models have more; the iPhone 7+ for example has 2900 mAh. On the other hand, they drain more for the screen.)
Battery capacity increases alone are meaningless when the hardware connected to it drains it just the same.
SE - 1624 mAh
What were these thicker heavier longer life phones of which you speak? I don't recall there being any of those to have rejected.
Maybe you mean ye olde feature phones or their predecessors. I don't think that's a fair comparison.
I don't see that much innovation in newer phones to warrant an upgrade, at least in the sense of spending hundreds of pounds on what amounts to be a slightly faster processor and the promise of Android O.
The only thing I can think of that might force my hand, outside of the phone breaking, is the security updates (Google no longer supports the Nexus 5 - so it will be stuck on Android 6 indefinitely)
If it weren't for the battery, I would have no reason to replace the phone, ever.
Maybe Lineage would speed up Maps/Chrome. Hmn.
Sounds like it's time to upgrade to Lineage, they still even support Nougat on Nexus 4.
I rather like not having googles sweaty little fingers in my mobile life all the time, been able to run Lineage from day 1 will be the single decisive factor on next phone whenever that is since everything else is basically a wash now.
Sharing data/settings already works great with the cloud.
You still get the same bulk as carrying around PC+phone.
The only reason is that maybe it's a bit cheaper because you use the same CPU for both, but the drawbacks (not being able to use both at the same time, slower proc for the PC) don't make it worth.
Local wired (or Bluetooth) data transmission will beat the Cloud on performance, not rely on third party security, and be immune from interruptions.
I see strong potential for movement away from the cloud.
The HP Elite x3 phone already does that.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2347628/computex-as...
- the laptop
- the tower workstation
- the smartphone
Maybe we should use something other than laptops ... maybe there is an as-yet-unforeseen device that our computing work should shift to. Until such time, we use laptops, and apple solved the laptop with the macbook air. There's nowhere to go from here but spec improvements. That's why they are desperately adding weirdo things like the touchbar - the form factor has been solved.
Same with tower workstations. You're not going to beat the cheesegrater mac pro. All you can do is bump the specs. This is a good thing - they solved that form factor. Unfortunately Apple has other priorities than churning out low volume, non-sexy updates to an under-the-desk device.
Finally, the smartphone: Apple solved that form factor with the iphone. Everything since then is really just an iphone with different sizes and different little details. They are all just monolithic touchscreen slabs. Maybe there is some new form factor waiting to be discovered, but that's a new product category - that would be real innovation and would be a jump just like the jump from dumbphones to smartphones. But for now, what we have are smartphones and they are all really just iphones - because the problem has been solved.
I have an iPhone 6s. I like it. I'd like to see longer battery life and higher storage capacity in future models, but otherwise it's a good phone.
I don't want it thinner - in fact, I'd be happy if they added some heft so I didn't need a case, without one it feels like it is about to fall out of my hand. (This might allow for a removable battery, which would also be useful)
I don't want a dumbphone - I like having access to all my music and podcasts. And I like being able to do secure texts and calls with Signal. Privacy advocates seem to fetishize burners and feature phones, but a "dumb" Nokia blasts out everything in the clear.
I think that's the usual way it happens.
Thicker, bigger battery phones fail because no case can make them lighter. They only address a niche while thin addresses everyone's needs.
And sealed batteries won because they can fit more capacity. Few people prefer carrying (and charging) two 8 hour batteries to a 10 hour sealed battery.
But I'm using an iPhone 7+ and for the first time since my last dumb phone, I have no battery life complaints. So while I'd still add more battery life if given the choice, it's not been an issue for the past 6 months.
I carry around a small USB battery pack these days (multiple if I'm travelling). I find the concept of external batteries better — the recharging process is seamless as compared to having to shut off the phone to switch batteries.
The ICE originated ... about 1880. Innovation in ICEs and automobiles peaked around the 1920s (Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016), and for aviation, jet propulsion excepted, about a decade later. Even jet aviation's progressed comparatively little since the 1960s, with most advances being in materials and control systems. Actual travel experience has declined as a function of total speed (though safety has improved).
I'm not discounting the possiblity that the ICE saw patent-induced retardation in development (the case is strongly made for steam power and Watt's extended patents, expiring in 1800). But I'd really like to see a source.
Maybe an interesting useful compromise, would be to build a patent pool(maybe between universities), where you must contribute any patent you develop, but you can use patents freely for research and small scale commercialization - but in any case of large scale commercialization, you agree to share some reasonable percent of royalties among the relevant patents of that pool , with the amount that goes towards each patent doesn't interefere with your business, and gets settled in a fair, sideway process ?
I wouldn't go that far. IP is a carrot for development. Imagine if you spend a decade and $100K developing an idea, and just when it started taking off, Oracle or somebody copied it and took the entire market. That can and does still happen, but at least you have legal recourse with IP laws.
It was originally a way to foster innovation for a maximum of 28 years, then the works would enter the public domain to be improved upon. Over the years, the copyright duration has become ridiculously long, negating the social benefits of it's existence.
The fundamental concept is sound, it's when it's perverted to help the wolves rather than the sheep that it stinks.
Often, as with, for example, spectrum, the people holding the license tend to view the object, and not the government granted license, as their perpetual property.
In that regard, intellectual property is the only property not built on human suffering.
- Batteries that can be fully charged in 5 minutes;
- Autonomy to go for a month without a charge, achieved by the combinations of new technologies in batteries, screens, chips and better software;
- Scratch and shock resistant screens that can be equally visible on daylight and at night, maybe by working like and colored e-reader screen when there's enough ambient light available, thus making reading more comfortable;
- Some kind of battery charging technology that improves over the awful usb connections that we have nowadays, whose cable connectors don't last much;
- Better cameras that rival today's DSLR. There are some experiences going on using several small combined cheap sensors in a single smartphone to achieve results in the DSLR range;
- Cheap and fast disk storage over say, 10 TB, as fast as RAM;
- Cheap and fast data connection at any location of the planet. Like streaming HD netflix in your tent in the middle of a blizzard in Antartida;
- High quality, small, wireless earphones whose batteries last for a week without recharging;
- Simpler, faster and more efficient development plataforms;
... And I'm sure you can add a few more. Each of these are changes that separately would not be considered exactly ground-breaking, but all of them together could bring mobile computing to a whole new level.
[1] http://bgr.com/2017/01/11/samsung-foldable-smartphones-relea...
A phone that incorporated debouncing on its touch screen would be innovative.
A phone that didn't require high manual dexterity in order to avoid tapping the wrong thing would be innovative.
So like no internet to talk to a friend through a phone from phone to phone(if you can call them a phone at that point).
Also if Apple or google get into the solar game by putting a super high efficiency panel on the phone that might change the world. They work at such large scales that it's likely drive the overall cost of solar panels through the floor so solar cars solar fridges solar tiles solar showers idk solar anything similar to what they did with quadrocopters.
Those would likely be the two main points of world changing ground breaking innovation I'd see. Idk how they'd achieve either of those things on the technical side but they have enough money to find out.
Example annoyance third party gallery app can't delete photos created by other photo app. Alternatively calibre companion can't access the same hierarchy as ebook readers. Until recently the offline map support was crap I think this has improved but as I already have Navigon for $30 to have this basic feature so I haven't verified this.
If you don't reboot it regularly it generally becomes unusable due to memory leaks eventually.
It crashes for no discernable reason on occasion usually when I'm not even using it surprise reboot!
The obnoxious need to hack your own device to have full control of it.
As an Android user my next phone will be a dumb phone plus laptop.
People have been saying that smartphones replaced cameras for years, but now they are not just a replacement but actually better.
There has still been innovation with dual cameras, finger print sensors, laser focus, better LED flash, USB type C and monthly Android security patches will probably encourage people to upgrade after they reach EoL for a device.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/inside...
Phones are good enough, sure. But top of the line phones still can't do low-light very well.
On the otherhand yeah, phone cameras getting better and enabling more and more applications is awesome.
On the other hand, I do not think AI is the next big thing. It is a good candidate to be so, but there should exist much better guesses we can make. You should have a product, not simply a way of doing something or a technology. You need to sell a product, so pure AI won't do anything.
But even if it doesn't do much by itself, it should play a big role in the coming S curve (as the article names it.)
Good article!
To the comments on platform shift, might you call it a paradigm shift? If so, Thomas Kuhn, the man who popularized that phrase in his book "On the Nature of Scientific Revolutions" argues that individuals within a revolution would likely not be aware of such a fact.
Upcoming innovations:
1.)Superior camera: Incredible Low Light sensitivity, Incredible compensation / correction for camera shake, will be better than any current implementation.
2.)AR support: example: http://www.waverlylabs.com/ This earpiece will work with a smartphone app.
Could someone explain this? My understanding was few in China used an iPhone and Android is extremely popular? Is that now out of date given Apple's recent pushes into the Chinese market?
So yes, you might be able to play the game indefinitely, but I doubt anyone will care about those extra picometers a phone managed to shave of.
Also, there is a limit to thinness. Maybe the rest of the phone could be hidden in an alternate universe and the only thing that protrudes in to our realm is the direct visual cortex stimulator.
We'll see.
Ftfy
The smartphone gave us pocket comms and information. Unfortunately, with the Jevons paradox and Gresham's Law impacting on our fundamentally limited attention -- rivality is the counterpoint of virality -- we're in a world in which distractions, distortions, impositions, agency, and privacy are up for grabs.
Contra several assertions within this thread, we've seen information systems and regimes which have lasted far beyond 50 years: speech and language themselves, early writing systems, clay tablets, papayrus, block printing, moveable type, increased literacy, ever cheaper and faster publishing methods, voice, image, moving image, and broadcast. More recently networks with some degree of peer-to-peer and mass comms integrated.
There have been advances and regressions. When Gutenberg first pulled the lever on his press in Europe, there were 30,000 books on the continent. Not 30,000 titles, but 30,000 books, total. There were 50 million by the end of the century, nearly a billion by 1800. Reproduction rates went from about 120 impressions an hour, to over one million with the steam-powered rotary presses of the late 19th century and early 20th, which promoted populist wars in Cuba, the Philippines, and the muddy trenches of Normandy.
Liberalisation in the 19th century lead to a fundamentalist backlash amongst early 20th century religious groups, particularly in the United States, the descendents of which are still active in creationist, young-earth, and global-warming denialist cults.
Mobile devices of today strike me as akin to patent-medicine and radium-water peddlers of an earlier age. We're waking up to the fact that these technologies have both positive and negative elements. The boosters, ben-evans amongst them, keep preaching more and faster, shades of the jetpack, flying car, meal-in-a-pill, and plastic-prefab-house fantasies of the 1930s through 1960s.
Instead, we realised that not all marketing claims are justified, that pollution presents real hazards, that there's something to be said for modestly-traditional housing and clothing styles (the 1990s grunge fad looked little like Lost in Space or Space 1999).
We're discovering that our social networks and bubble-filtered news meshes poorly with liberal democracy, or carefully-cultivated brand-consciousness, in the case of YouTube. Spam and phone solicitations crowd out what few moments of uninterrupted time we can find -- the technorati now revel in not being connected, rather than jacking in to their email every five minutes. A practice which was freakish in 1999, naff today.
Among the largest disruptions of the 1990s was a small local events-and-items listing which was passed about via email. Turns out that it accomplished, at far less cost, and price, what newspaper classifieds did at the time.
Whilst Moore's Law appears to be winding down in terms of chip density and capacity, the cost component of it isn't, and we still have the fact that computing costs are falling by roughly an order of magnitude each decade. This means that what Google accomplished in the 1990s, Facebook could achieve at roughly 1/10 the cost, and today's Emerging Threats will be able to achieve at 1/10 the cost of Facebook, 1/100th that of Google.
It also means that the cost horizon is shifting, from making and obtaining compute devices, to managing and organising them. If you're interested in getting a log of conditions over the life of a package shipment, you can slap a $5 SOC unit in the packaging and have it phone home when it finds WiFi (or 4GL) at its destination. In ten years, that will be a $0.50 SOC, in twenty, $0.05.
We're likely to have tens or hundreds of billions of such devices, all around us. Which at such price-points, won't be worth the time to property engineer, secure, harden, or patch.
Collectively, these will have a considerable amount of processing power.
And though most of these devices won't be tied in to physical systems, that compute power might be put to use finding those that are and ... persuading them in various ways. Lights. Heating systems. Automated vacuums. Industrial control machinery. Drones. Self-driving vehicles.
Food for thought.