Hacker News Reader

Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

> Email across the planet has been around since day one.

It has been present around the globe for ages, if you could find an internet cafe on holiday. Reading email on your phone also needs a smartphone.

> Mass transit has had posted schedules for many years. It is nice to see an updated one with up to the minute tracking but it wasn’t that inconvenient either.

You must be one of the blessed multitudes that live in a country with a public transport system that works well. If you have frequent, long-term delays it is fairly essential for your sanity to be able to know which routes are not currently completely fucked.

View on HN

>>Reading email on your phone also needs a smartphone.

Nokia 6310 could both read and send emails, and I'm sure the functionality arrived slightly earlier too.

>>second point

I mean, if I'm in some 3rd world country without a reliable public transport system, then I'm not sure how internet access or a smartphone for that matter helps at all. In my experience in those places the bus/train just turns up when it does, no website would help you here.

> I mean, if I'm in some 3rd world country without a reliable public transport system

Do you honestly think it's a binary choice? Either the public transport system is reliable, or it's a 3rd world country? This seems disingenuous.

Just to take an example: Southern Rail in the UK. It's notoriously unreliable, and journeys get cancelled or delayed all the time for various reasons, including strikes, weather, staff shortages and leaves on the tracks. I've saved countless hours from going to waste by keeping up to date on the schedule in real time. For this I need a smart phone. Is the UK a 3rd world country?

You have some valid points but it's like you feel compelled to reject all possible benefits put forward by OP. On this one you are objectively wrong.

I can't remember the exact app name, it's been a few years, but CMU had an app for Pittsburgh Port Authority buses. They were almost always off the posted schedule. The app used people already on the bus and some other factors to determine location and give a far more accurate estimate. It saved me numerous times from missing a bus/thinking I missed a bus that ran only once an hour (54). From my experience, smart phones and technology certainly do help with unreliable public transit.

I didn't know a 6310 could read and send email, thank you. I stopped having Nokia phones after the 3310i (which I did love dearly).

There are numerous first world countries that have unreliable public transport. This is the US and also in the EU, I can't imagine you've never encountered what I mean unless you don't travel very much (there is nothing wrong with that, but then why do you discuss it like this). Sure in the situations that you talk about a smartphone would not matter, but in the ones I talk about (and that I actually meant originally) a smartphone will tell you why there is a delay (suddenly, generally) and what you can do to mitigate it. Something no PA system will tell you with any amount of reliability.

I live in EU, but in not-so-reliable public transit country.

Outside of major towns, smart phone won't help you much to get most accurate time table. Paper timetable in the station is the only source of true information. You may find multiple contradicting timetables on the web and just hope they haven't been changed since then. Nobody cares to post emergency updates on the web. Sticker in the station it is. GPS live tracking is non existent.

We do have live tracking for public transit in 2 (maybe 3?) major towns. But that came before the era of smartphones - it was displayed in displays in stops. It's kinda cool to see your bus stuck in traffic one stop from you :)

Which country is that? Just out of curiosity (fellow European).

Lithuania. Our beloved Trafi does wonders. But it doesn't cover obscure little towns :(

Oh ok, but good to know :) I always wanted to visit the baltic countries once, and I usually travel around with public transport, so I'd have to consider that when planning I guess.

Well, public transit between major cities and in/out of country is OK. Online timetables are reliable enough, you can get tickets online etc.. No live GPS tracking though :) But tourist attractions in smaller towns or, worst of all, in between them is kinda.. tricky. One of the reasons why hitch hiking is not dead.

>I mean, if I'm in some 3rd world country without a reliable public transport system, then I'm not sure how internet access or a smartphone for that matter helps at all. In my experience in those places the bus/train just turns up when it does, no website would help you here.

I'm in Canada, my internet on my phone is more than good enough, yet it's not rare to see bus 10 minutes late and it happens often to need a second bus that may be 10 minutes after the first one. Traffic is not exclusive to third world country. Our bus have real time tracking so I can know 10 minutes earlier if taking another route is the right thing to do.

A flip-phone can be a smart phone.

Blackberries were smartphones. They had enumerable apps shoved into that tiny display, and keyboard model, but they still looked like flip-phones and lacked touch displays.

To me, the 'flip' is just a mechanical implementation detail. The real divide is smart phones versus dumb phones.

Or even between phones with app stores / web browsers / sideloading, and those without.

A phone that comes with its own apps (like old flip-phones) but doesn’t offer any other extensibility, usually only has apps written by the manufacturer to support standard protocols like email and SMS, and no support for any company’s walled-garden social superstimulus factory. Even WAP was okay, since WAP only worked to deliver information, not interactive “experiences.”

(Admittedly, one of those apps could have been an IRC client, which would have been quite immersing. Luckily we never saw such from the manufacturers—they left that sort of thing to the J2ME sideloading ecosystem.)

>It has been present around the globe for ages, if you could find an internet cafe on holiday. Reading email on your phone also needs a smartphone.

Oh Simulation Creator, shudder I just remembered when Sears installed an internet cafe haha.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com