I Don't Like Smartphones (2016)
devever.net
devever.net
I sure am looking forward to that article, from where I'm sitting they absolutely saved web design.
Before mobile, I absolutely could not get any designer to grok that browser windows were flexible things, and most users were not looking at the web on full-screen browsers on desktop displays. The term "responsive design" didn't even exist until the advent of the smartphone, to the best of my knowledge.
Hell, we were still looking down the barrel of an eternity of MSIE 6 support until iOS Safari became important. (and the Youtube thing, of course)
I'm not arguing for Flash games now, I think there are much better tools today. But back then it was a boon to indie/experimental game developers (and animation artists) and enabled them to develop relatively cheap games and reach a wide audience.
I don't know about the 5" screens since I rarely browse the web on my phone, but it's pretty clear to me that most sites are not designed for huge screens.
I have a 4K 32" screen, and I've lost count of the number of sites that will expand to take up all the available width and show absurdly long lines of text. And since I'm using a tiling window manager, the window is basically full-screen.
One such example: TFA.
Tiling wm works well for me with tall/narrow browser windows utilizing the "phone view". I rarely have full-screen browser window, it's more often 1/4 to 2/3 screen width.
edit: Well I would delete this comment, because it looks like its a fixed problem, I guess not doing css for the past 4 years, i'm a bit out of the loop.
http://xahlee.info/js/css_multi-column_layout.html
Although its still not 100% reasonable (if i'm understanding), there should be a way to instead of specifing the column counts rather specify roughly the column attributes and have the browser determine the column count and flow the text. You would think `column-count: auto` would do that but at least on ff, that just means `column-count: 1`
Although, part two of this are the really irritating web pages that refuse to vertically scroll more than 50-100 items because it breaks their pagination. Yielding a case where I'm "shopping" (looking at logs/whatever) and the items are only filling the top 1/3 of my monitor. Part three are the applications that scroll but can't accurately reflect where in the wall of text one is actually at (think slack/etc).
On laptops, they are the minority but somewhat common i think. I'd guess trackpads are still way more common.
On desktops it is mouse and keyboard.
And CSS still seems to be unable to differentiate between these three - or even just between mobile/tablet and laptop/desktop (though there are cases where a 27" desktop monitor is not the same as a 14" laptop monitor), which is one of the reasons things are so awful. So people use hacks like minimum width or whatever as shown here:
https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp
Now it might be w3schools being bad and there is a better way but every single site i see out there that uses responsive design (what a name) does that. Assuming they bother with desktop at all.
Not to mention that they assume that all people use browsers in a maximized state. I have a huge monitor so i always keep browsers at around 1000px or less, which often triggers the "oh you are on a mobile, lemme bloat up everything for you" style.
Everything on the menus was everything you could do. Easy, usable.
That was a good GUI.
Now you have "material" (Bauhaus) design... done TOTALLY wrong.
The form doesn't follow usability at all. Just a posh design trying to mimic a static format as if the computer screen was a flat magazine cover or an information panel on a building. Zero usability.
We need the System 7, Be/Haiku, Windows 9x... design back. Now.
Flat design has only one good thing about it: it can be easily done with vector graphics. Which is important for modern high-dpi displays. But I'll gladly go back to using a bunch of bitmaps for every button if that meant the UI would become more intuitive.
> We need the System 7, Be/Haiku, Windows 9x... design back. Now.
Skeuomorphism (OS X 10.9, Windows 7) was nice too tbh.
# ln
ln: missing file operand
Try 'ln --help' for more information.
I wish there was some sort of "parameter hint" for the terminal, like in an IDE. You type `ln` or `find` or `grep` and it pops up above the cursor and tells you what parameters the command expects.
grep... I dunno, I guess I use it enough to be used to it.
find is kind of a pain, I can never remember if the path goes first or second. Honestly I just do something like
locate <thing> | grep <path where I expect it to be>
Just type a "-" for a flag, trigger autocomplete and you get a list of options with descriptive names
Except, before mobile almost everyone was looking at the web on full-screen browsers.
Hell, now its hard to convince people that you don't want to download an app to use a webservice.
> we were still looking down the barrel of an eternity of MSIE 6 support until iOS Safari became important.
It was Chrome that really dislodged MSIE. And, frankly, at least MSIE believed in keeping legacy features available. Whatever else the issues were (and they are legion), MS hated bitrot.
https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB
I've used that as the foundation for more complex designs.
Fluid is nice. It's hardly complicated of itself, though of course, a sufficiently brittle design will make it so.
You can always use a burner phone with a fake identity if you want to stick it to the man.
For the uninformed, living in the U.S., how do I get a burner phone that isn’t associated with my identity? I’ve looked in the past, it’s been a few years admittedly, but it seemed non-trivial.
It's generally the case that if you want a prepaid SIM card, you go to pretty much any shop to buy it for a nominal fee (usually just £1, but shops that rip you off may charge up to £5 in some cases). As soon as you buy and activate a top-up voucher, you are good to go. At no point is your identity or a card payment required.
As you can see, there are many additional steps that can be done to ensure anonymous use of said burner phone.
- The location the device was turned on, used, turned off.
- The devices contacted by the burner phone
The kind of graph databases the government uses can round down the number of people that could be using any burner phone to a reasonable guess after just the first power on and contact (call/text). This is possible with only metadata. If you have the persons voice and message content it's even easier. As the phone stays on and contacts multiple numbers the graph database increasingly narrows down the possible user. I would guess within 3 calls/texts (not considering location data, or god-forbid other smartphone data) you would have 99%+ certainty who the user was if those interactions follow any previously known pattern.
You can't hide.
Nonsense ;) You just can't practically and cheaply hide. The various world governments regularly hide things from the other world governments. Crime organizations manage to stay operating, etc. I forget the exact statistic, but the FBI's most wanted list has a 90+% effective capture rate, but that leaves some that manage to hide sufficiently well as individuals. How much of that is luck vs skill is unknown by me at least.
To be fair, I basically agree with you, it probably takes 1 mistake to leave a useful to trackers digital footprint that can get back to you, so it takes a lot of skill/luck to leave no digital traces these days, but it is arguably possible, even for individuals, it's just not remotely easy.
To think it's as easy as using a VPN is ridiculous. It's generally not the technology, it's the relationships and habits that get you tracked. I.e. It doesn't take a genius to see the communication logs and figure out the close relationships. We all regularly communicate with our loved ones and do the same sorts of things day after day.
It depends on who you want to be anonymous from. A spouse? Ad tech companies? Local cops? The FBI/Homeland Security? The various intelligence agencies of the world?
[0]: https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_P...
[0] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...
If you sign up for a post-paid cell phone plan. That comes with a credit check an the option to finance your phone.
What adversary are you worried about? Taking to a divorce lawyer without your spouse knowing? Not having higher-skill cybercriminals bypass your SMS-based 2FA via SIM-swap? Outsmarting the NSA? The answer really depends...
This is what I used to do back when I was poor and couldn't afford a cell phone plan. It was pre-smartphone, but I see data included on the prepaid "minutes" now.
Before cell phones I used to buy minutes on calling cards[1] at Walmart in order to call long distance.
It seems like the phone as GPS+ is use-case you identified.
I will say though, even dumb phones have web browsers, and have for a long time. You can access Yelp over the internet on a candybar from a decade ago.
What?
> Restaurant reviews? Who actually needs those except maybe on a road trip?
Anyone who likes to visit new restaurants.
Do people really choose new restaurants while out (unless on a road trip)? I can see using Yelp while planning to go somewhere with friends, but once you're actually outside the house? In other words, I don't see a use case for Yelp outside the computer, with the exception of a road trip.
None of this is true.
> Do people really choose new restaurants while out (unless on a road trip)?
Yes, very often. Maybe I'm at the pub with my partner and we decide to get dinner somewhere. I'll use reviews to find something. It's a very very common use case.
Wow, way to fill in use cases I didn't think of.
> Maybe I'm at the pub with my partner and we decide to get dinner somewhere. I'll use reviews to find something.
You go out to a bar before dinner? I suppose some people do. I've always thought of dinner as starting an evening out, or at the very least being part of a plan (eg, Show X followed by dinner at Y)
Does it matter? Maybe they wanna look for a bar after dinner then? In which case, you know, the phone is still useful.
>I've always thought of dinner as starting an evening out, or at the very least being part of a plan (eg, Show X followed by dinner at Y)
I'd suggest you look into the idea of spontaneity. It can be pretty great.
Since you tried condescending at the end of your comment: I suggest you try places that smell good from the street and not outsource your thinking to an app. It can be pretty great.
Are you incapable of escaping from your little corner of the world?
>I suggest you try places that smell good from the street and not outsource your thinking to an app.
Guess what? I can, and do, do both!
Do you remember annoying it was to use the browser on those candybar phones?
I think the browser on candybars was annoying, but it also was sufficient. Not for daily browsing, but for occasional lookups.
The problem is that we've gotten used to devices which turn us almost exclusively into consumers instead of using computing devices more as Douglas Engelbart envisioned them: human intellect force-multipliers.
Part of the problem with phones is intentional (massive centralization), but some can't be helped (input capabilities are very limited on a phone).
We should probably be part of the solution.
You cannot do that everywhere (legally). For example in Greece you are required to give your id to the network provider or they block your sim card.
False. I bet the vast majority of content available online is now (think of pics and short videos) created on smartphones.
> They are not real network clients. Smartphones have powerful CPUs and fast network connections, except that you aren't actually allowed to use these resources in any meaningful sense, because doing so consumes battery power, and people don't want the precious battery life of their phones drained unnecessarily.
Falsy (maybe truee in 2016 when the article was written)
...
> They have led to massive centralization. Part of the “cloud” movement is probably driven by the fact that while smartphones have substantial computational resources, you can't actually use them because of battery life. So instead the computation is done in the cloud, creating a dependency on a centralized entity.
Maybe true
> They have ruined web design.
Nope, poor "mobile first" (aka let's apply mobile ui patterns to every other devices) ruined webdesign
> There are no secure smartphones.
True, like there's no secure PC. Or mac.
Unfortunately, smartphones, due to their form factor, don't actually allow precise editing or manipulation of content - which is what is usually meant by the idea that "smartphones are devices for consumption, and not creation".
The same applies to text, to some extent. Yes, you can author a novel on a smartphone, but it's gonna be an excruciating process if you want to do any fine text manipulation at all.
The precision of editing they do allow is "good enough" for the average Joe.
If content creation devices aren't the devices that create content, then what are they?
I think that's a very good question. It's clear that devices like that are useful for some form of content creation, but I'm don't know if the term to refer to them has been coined or not.
Intuitively, they don't seem to fit in the category we used to call "content creation", since that nearly always was synonymous with creation+precision, rather than "any kind of creation".
Have fun writing a novel, designing a presentation, remixing a song or making a video game on a smartphone.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procreate-pocket/id916366645
But just because something it is technically possible it doesn't mean it suited for it.
Wanna make music? Press the chord buttons to play a tone on the synthesizer preset that you can't modify!
Wanna edit video? Drag your clips into this timeline with 3 transition effects and a half-dozen compositing themes!
The actual main point he was making is that you can't use the device to create things for the device, things that can make use of the device's capabilities. In effect the device is a console. And consoles are purely for consumption. Sure, consoles allow you to make recordings of your gaming sessions, etc., but they can't be used to create the games. And gaming recordings are not content, but a byproduct enabled by the actual content.
Only photographers, influencers, and etc. have the time or need to do a full pro-camera -> Editing Station -> Publish cycle for the majority of their content.
I would say the content is not "pics and short videos", but rather TikTok / Instagram / Snapchat / etc.
Most such apps are developed on PCs and consumed on smart phones.
Even if this isn't true, it's not a great point. Most people didn't use their home PCs to create content anyways, so the ability to create content more or less went to waste.
Rooting is getting more difficult, bootloaders are getting more and more unlockable, SafetyNet and this new Play Integrity API are simply user-hostile.
There is absolutely no real rational reason to deny root access. Sure, non-technical people could mess something up, but if you make rooting just a combination of putting it in e.g. the fastboot mode and then running a single command to get root access. (Factory-State: No root-access), nobody would accidentally mess up the phone.
Speak for yourself, my phone is for communicating with friends and recording memories.
> This cultural equality is diminished by an exodus to devices
What the heck is "cultural equality" and what do people using smartphones have to do with it? Does the author think nobody owns a desktop/laptop anymore?
> They are not real network clients.
Neither is your laptop if you want good battery life.
> They have led to massive centralization.
Is that why Discord is popular on mobile, and not on desktop? Wait, no, it's popular regardless of platform.
---
How does this kind of article make it to the front page of HN, seriously?
The number of households where the only compute device is a mobile device is probably higher than you give it credit. I know it was for me. I'm not including "smart" devices or IoT devices. These same households may not even have an internet connection in them so that the mobile device is their only method of data consumption.
In that case, smartphones seem to be pretty great at giving people the option to participate in the internet. I know hobby animators, artists, and musicians that produce work solely on their smartphone.
While this probably leans to yes more often than not, however, it is 100% totally possible to own/use a laptop/desktop without using the internet. See all of computer history before the internet as an example. You can totally animate, "paint", create music without being online. Again, see all of art history pre-internet.
Obvioulsy YouTube creators don't give a shit about security of their content to the level of MPAA facilities, so it will definitely skew to higher non-secure internet connected creators than secured non-connected. But it is not 0%
>>How much content do you see created on computers not connected to the internet versus created on a smartphone?
Me personally, a lot. I even gave anecdotal supporting evidence, and with that, you can assume you've seen some of this content as well. The vast majority of my own personally created content is also created on non-internet connected hardware.
>but I'm not sure what any of that has to do with the point that the author is making in TFA
Conversations evolve.
The title alone is pure HN-bait.
Reality: It's like having a smart TV in your pocket!
Only because the platform is artificially locked down.
While the author is singing praises of a desktop computer with XMPP and self-hosted websites, back then there was a similar movement of people ranting against all this "modern tech" and saying we should just read the newspaper, use telephones to communicate and go out of our houses more. He probably fondly looks back at his late night IRC sessions and LAN parties while there were people writing "I don't like Computers (1996)" articles.
The thing in some areas computers today are much better than they used to be but that doesn't mean everything is better. There are cases where computers are worse.
And yes, there were people years ago who were saying similar things, that doesn't mean they were always wrong, it can also mean they were noticing things that others didn't notice or cared about. See, for example, Wirth's plea for lean software in 1995 - software certainly hasn't gone better on that regard since then.
- good keypad (no accidental double presser, clear tactile feedback)
- voice calls, SMS
- 4g wifi hotspot
- power management good enough to not run out of battery when used as a wifi hotspot and plugged in
- good ui for the requirements above (e.g. ability to choose whether wifi is shut down if no connected devices)
(bonus points for being rugged and waterproof)
My previous try, nokia 8110 new version nailed 2 out of those 5, and as a result, I gave up pretty soon. To my knowledge there is no phone in the market at the moment that fills these requirements, and I find it odd.
I have a "Flip IV" right now (AT&T sent me one when I hooked up my 8110 to their network because that doesn't support VoLTE), and other than being waterproof, it meets your requirements nicely. There are some waterproof devices with the same features, though.
Please for their sake if not mine, post a specific link.
Thanks.
Also, I suspect: s/Literary/Literally/
Stop with this BS please.
1. 90% of the ‘communicating’ I do with my phone these days is text messaging, and I almost never make voice calls anymore.
2. Dumb phones are terrible devices to use when it comes to text messaging.
If I had to hazard a guess, it'd be that not enough people want them for it to be a financially viable product.
It’s still a smartphone in that it runs a flavor of Android.
But they nailed the tactile keys I remember missing and still miss about phones with physical keyboards.
Not my daily driver, just something I had been following since the kickstarter and ordered one to fiddle about with. I ended up turning it into my “work phone/pagerduty device”. For that particular purpose, it works very well. YMMV
General commentary:
- A laptop or e-ink tablet can run other voice comms (Jitsi, Zoom, Skype, etc.) These are also generally more capable systems and convenient to use when seated or established at some location. The dividing line between present-gen phones and smaller tablets (beginning at 6") is ... slim.
- SMS is itself not secure and highly problematic. As much as I'd like a dumb phone, I'm not sure I'd trust it to even SMS. Voice comms alone, or support for a secure encrypted messaging system. SMS itself seems too limited to allow an encryption extension, though xmms might suffice.
- Splitting the phone and the hotspot functionalities is an option. That's an additional service, but might be preferable.
- For the phone, I'd prefer a monochrome display, preferably e-ink, with a backlight or frontlight for low-light conditions. Hardware keyboard similar to the Blackberry, Palm Treo, or Palm Centrol might suffice.
- The Psion Series 5 may well have been the perfect mobile communicator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5
Otherwise, a B&W candy-bar phone along the lines of the Nokia 3310, or a flip phone like the Ericsson T28 or Motorola Razr would be a welcome sight.
The feature I'd most appreciate in any of these for the present which wasn't available in their initial deployments is strict whitelist-based call acceptance. Any unknown numbers roll directly to voicemail or are rejected entirely.
And they become more serious over time, as we've moved more and more of society and interaction onto them...
> And smartphones are here to stay.
I don't think this is at all a given, though. If more people start rejecting them in favor of something simpler, with less permissions, that's closer to a legacy communication device, it allows others to consider that, yes, you might be able to get away without one. Or with a less capable one.
> So how do we fix these issues?
Stop using a smartphone in your personal life, and be at least a slightly vocal "that person," because a lot of other people I've talked to don't like smartphones either for a wide range of options - but don't consider there to be any alternatives. So when I can show off a device that still lets me do voice/text, can check email if I care, has basic mapping, and... not an awful lot else, it's an option that most people quite literally didn't know existed.
For more details about the alternatives and what they can/can't do, I've written up some of my thoughts over the last few months of using a KaiOS device here: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/01/22/kaios-bananaphone-flip-iv-...
But the reality is that I'm fine with a lot of my communication being computer-based now (with a keyboard). I still manage some group texts, but tend to only actually contribute if it's something critical ("Can you make this date work?") and skip a lot of the random BSing in the threads.
If your requirements are "I want everything I can do on a smartphone, but without a smartphone," you end up in an impossibility, so just find the least offensive black mirror you can and go on with it. But if you're willing to sit back and figure out what actually matters from a phone, and what's a nice-to-have, there are plenty of other options out there.
In many countries you're forced to use closed apps to log in to government services, banks, and whatnot. If those could run in VMs it would also be rather nice. (Some of them actually try to detect if it's being run on a real phone or not).
You can get a modern flip phone or such, that supports things like VoLTE (AT&T is dropping support for all non-VoLTE phones here... soon, if they haven't already), and there are some candybars, but going with "older devices" will soon enough prevent you from connecting to the cell networks at all. 2G is gone in most areas, 3G is going away, etc.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to build some kind of proxy?? hardware/software to solve this problem. Maybe some combination of tx/rx modules for old and new networks. Maybe use a SDR for the old tx/rx module as it would only need to tx a short distance to the old phone
And then you're carrying an ancient device plus another proxy. At some point, it's easier to just buy a halfway recent flip phone and use it until it dies.
Technically possible, sure. Practical, I don't think nearly as much.
Plus, if you're actually rebroadcasting an old signal over the air, then the FCC gets involved. And that's an entire new can of worms.
Recently I reached almost every conclusion this author did independently.
Dropped my cell carrier a year ago downgrading my phone to a wifi tablet and ditched even that device as an experiment a few months ago and have no desire to go back now. I am reachable when I choose to be at my desk. No notifications follow me to the bathroom or to the bar table with my friends. I feel like my life is mine again.
I am finally -present- in everything I am doing and am finally after over a decade am capable of being alone in my own head without frantically searching for a phone to tell me what to think about.
I leave home with no electronics other than sometimes a digital music player and just take note of the world around me. No electronics are allowed in the bedroom at all.
+1000 would recommend to anyone. Smartphones and the need to be -constantly- distracted is an unhealthy addiction for most that have a desktop or laptop computer they can access intentionally when needed.
Egalitarian cries of "Internet for everyone!" have devolved into bullshit that ruthless companies looking for more profits have co-opted. Again, it's not like it would have worked out anyway.
Lately, I've been thinking the world would be much better off without this easily accessible casino/skinner box/echo chamber/surveillance state. A lot of social cohesion problems really started with widespread access to smartphones, in my opinion.
Of note is that old Nokia devices used to allow this (i.e. arbitrary TCP connections including long-lived instant messaging ones) and they reached longer battery lives than any Android device I ever had.
They traditionally claim that you just can't have multiple long-lived TCP connections due to the keepalives keeping the radio powered on constantly, as well as the reconnect traffic (due to e.g. roaming) being significant. However, both things are fixed by coealescing all keepalives. Probably this doesn't scale to thousands of connections, but it does definitely scale to a couple tens.
I Don't Like Smartphones (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154965 - June 2019 (98 comments)
Why I don't like smartphones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11097994 - Feb 2016 (281 comments)
There are no secure smartphones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905643 - Jan 2016 (118 comments)
This drives me nuts. I want to improve my security posture and user experience by owning and controlling my own phone and breaking its link to the vendor, removing shitty bloatware to reduce the attack surface, etc.
I'm happy to take responsibility for applying my own updates / patches. Samsung and Google don't have a monopoly on being competent to secure a device, and as the device ages they do an increasingly shittier job of that than other options out there.
I tried to put an unrooted Lineage on it, but the banking app closed on start. A lot of people in the Play store are complaining, but every answer of the developer is: "We updated it, try again."
I've gone for many month stretches with no phone, and learned to live the old fashioned way again. Arrange meetings, look up directions before leaving, etc. This tended to give me problems in my marriage though as I wasn't available to be contacted while I was out. I was considering a "dumb phone", but I enjoy using slack and having my work calendar available to me, otherwise I will forget meetings.
It's kinda true that unless an app can make money, a quality app has almost zero change of existing, while it's really not true on desktop. The APIs change too often, too much planned obsolescence, etc.
I like my smartphone but I agree with this article.
I agree entirely, mostly because there's not a huge difference between that and simply not carrying a phone... or your battery is dead unless you carry a bag full of spares.
The state of non-Android Linux phones (PinePhone, Librem 5, etc) leaves an awful lot to be desired, and I'll argue that for most of the stuff that actually works on those devices right now, you're better off carrying a random flip phone that works on modern networks, with week+ battery life. They'll do about the same things, but the flip phone is far cheaper and more likely to actually send/receive phone calls if you need it to.
I'm glad the non-Android Linux devices exist, I have a PinePhone I'm messing with, but they're not really daily driver grade yet, without quite a bit of pain.
The problem with this is that a lot of services don't make apps for this (banks, gov't services, messenger services, etc.) and that the value of such a phone is hugely reduced.
It's basically Microsoft Windows anno ~2000 all over again, except now we can "choose" between Android and iOS (marginally better, I suppose).
- Data is siloed into apps. If it’s stored locally at all its within app-specific databases. In many cases it’s principally stored on cloud.
- Applications cannot interoperate / share data. At best they share URLs or clipboard content.
- The filesystem is not univerally user-accessibly.
- Application process management means that any app can be closed at any time. Any unsaved state, and there’s frequently a lot, may disappear. Even within apps, content is unstable. E.g., if I am composing a longer comment or post and am researching it in other browser tabs, odds are high the composition itself will be wiped. This is the largest single issue I have.
- Linux userland tools are limited. For me this is key to productivity. Termux is very, very, very good for what it does. What it does is still limited, and not available on iOS.
- Simple basics such as keyboard-based navigation (see Mozilla Firefox/Android / Fennic/Android). Keyboard implementation in applications themselves is at best inconsistent. This is functionality that’s as old as interactive computing (1960s and before) that is failing. In Pocket, (article archiver) I cannot use the backspace key when writing tags, there is simply no response. In PocetBook (an ebook reader), I cannot enter a space when composing a search, instead the document scrolls. There are other similar issues.
- Surveillance and monitoring are pervasive throughout the OS and applications ecosystem.
- At the OS and application level, all design intent is focused on consumption and surveillance rather than my own productivity and creation.
- Hardware support by OS vendors is limited to a few years for most owners. Google “commits” to three years, which is mostly aspirational as it may be a matter of months, if not no OS updates at all following purchase. Apple does somewhat better here.
- The touch-focused interface is imprecise and frustrating, lacking the multi-mode functionality and locational precision of a mouse-based interface. Or the blunt effectiveness of text.
In short: I can’t control my own data, I can’t rely on basic input functionality, tools are insanely crippled, decades-old UI/UX conventions are flouted, user state is at peril of being lost at any time, power-tool availability is limited, and surveillance is pervasive.
Tablets are a shit productivity environment. Full stop.
FWIW: I’m writing this on a tablet. I know its limitations well.
In another post I make the case against tablets noting that there is virtually nothing they do which isn't better performed by either a far-more-capable laptop (even a cheap and minimal one) or a dedicated device: a dedicated (and preferably dumb) phone, a still or video camera (now largely the same thing), an audio recorder. Yes, it's a backlash against "convergence", but the gains and wins are huge.
So smartphone companies put so much emphasis on the camera and, to a lesser extent, other built-in input devices, because...?
> Smartphones have powerful CPUs and fast network connections, except that you aren't actually allowed to use these resources in any meaningful sense, because doing so consumes battery power, and people don't want the precious battery life of their phones drained unnecessarily.
True, and this is a big hurdle for ~every attempt to gain traction with modern peer-to-peer protocols. Approximately no-one wants their smartphone battery to die in four hours flat so they can help serve decentralized YouTube on IPFS.
> Part of the “cloud” movement is probably driven by the fact that while smartphones have substantial computational resources, you can't actually use them because of battery life. So instead the computation is done in the cloud, creating a dependency on a centralized entity.
They didn't replace PCs, though. "Real" computation (by these standards) availability has continued to grow alongside smartphones. I'm skeptical how many more PCs would have been sold in a world without smartphones, and exactly how much more "creation" would be going on (though nb. I think "smartphones are just consumption devices" is a totally bizarre take disconnected from reality in the first place)
> They have ruined web design.
Heh. Yes, kinda, but then again several of the best versions of sites (that have multiple versions) are the mobile one. I'm pretty sure web design ruined web design, not smart phones.
> They are devices of unclear alignment, or of clear malevolence.
Pretty damning that the most popular and widely used computing platform we could come up with, falls under this category. If only non-mobile operating systems weren't almost all completely terrible to use, for normal people.
> With a PC, I don't have to perform some arcane operation to actually have control of the device.
Do I need to link to a billion search results dispensing the advice, "you're going to want to disable [MS virus scan / selinux / auto-updates / telemetry / et c] using [the command line / the "about" settings page / et c.] or it'll just keep [getting in your way / breaking / misbehaving]", or can I assume everyone's familiar with that?
Also, Vita's batteries are much worse than the ones for smartphones.
The PS Vita likely devotes most of its power to its CPU and GPU hardware. Its screen resolution is also relatively low, so it doesn't take very many cycles to render.
A smartphone has a tighter power budget. For one thing, the battery is significantly smaller to keep the phone thin. It has to power the cell modem constantly. The display resolution is significantly higher, so there's one or two orders of magnitude more pixels.
The PS Vita menu is probably getting re-rendered at 60Hz in a loop that's also sampling for input events. The menu is just another "game".
The smartphone menu is probably getting indirectly rendered through an abstraction that allows the framebuffer to only minimally be updated as display elements change. Events are likely coming in asynchronously rather than being polled. The rendered image looks the same, but there was significantly more code in the path vs. the game console.
You could eliminate all that complex code and make a phone UI feel snappy like a game, but the power consumption would shoot up and drastically reduce on-time for the same battery size.
And notability worse downloads.