A 'screenless smartphone' | Hacker News Reader

A 'screenless smartphone'

vice.com

106 pointswatchdogtimer96 comments

This article is clearly a paid advertisement, as you can see at the end. It’s also maybe the worst tech writing I’ve ever read, so bad it’s almost funny. Some of the best worst lines:

> “Visuals may be half the fun of technology, but there are pros of owning a screenless smartphone, such as giving your eyes a break, saving moolah on high-roaming phone charges, and avoiding germs on screens”

> “… an adjustable base memory cable for your neck, and is charged through an A type C-USB cable pod“

Written so hastily they misquoted the "discount" offered (57%, when the clickthru clearly says 51%).

Also great is the definition of a SIM card:

“A SIM stands for security information management, and traditionally collects, monitors, and analyzes security-related data.”

This writer has never worked in IT before and is wholly unqualified.

Edit: I do not know who the writer is. The mangling of “SIM” is enough to know they should not be writing tech articles.

Makes one wonder what else Vice writers make up off the top of their heads and aren’t challenged on by editors.

The whole tone was very funny. "Is this the best thing since sliced bread? Well, they sure are paying me to say so!"

The constant swearing is also really professional. Swearing surely increases the likelihood of a purchase, everybody knows that.

It's a professional requirement at Vice.

Screenless smartphones could totally be viable as a product, especially for visually impaired folks.

The problem is only one: PROPRIETARY APPLICATIONS

Could you write a custom and simplified Facebook Messenger client that would allow clear and complete navigation through hardware buttons or vocal commands? Abso-fucking-lutely!

Can you do it without Facebook's approval which will never come? Abso-fucking-lutely not!

Open source as an accessibility feature. I never realized. It would be a nice HN frontpage post.

Here you go:

"What’s the Value of Hackable Hardware, Anyway?" https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6031

Although the hardware, the precursor, is more akin to a PDA than a smartphone it very well allows for mods targeting e.g. impaired vision, as the featured prototype of a braille keyboard shows.

Eh more like "open APIs as an accessibility feature".

Most open source software I've used has terrible accessibility, both for blind and sighted people.

I'm sure you've used software with open APIs with terrible accessibility too, the point is that with enough interest, open APIs make it easier to make alternate frontends. And open source implies an open API with the additional advantage of making it easier to modify the frontend.

In principle this is true, but my experience for accessiblity is: Apple first (they are amazing), Windows second (although many use 3rd party apps like JAWS), then Linux a distant third.

It's clearly time to legally force those companies to open up apis, so many possibilities are lost.

Or rather, you can with enough effort, but might get negative legal attention.

You could do it by hijacking accessibility features.

Don't worry, it's coming soon with the Digital Markets Act [1]

[1] - https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

That looks very good. And even if it starts in Europe it makes enough sense as to other countries to follow.

Agreed that it looks great, but there is zero chance it gets implemented in the US. Not with the tech lobbying money floating around in Washington.

Wow, this act looks amazing. I hope it will go through. What is the usual timeline for these kinds of acts?

You got me so thrilled that I posted it for a discussion. Right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309576

It already has gone through, it goes into effect from the 1st of November and will become applicable in May.

I'm not sure I agree. Those apps are already (somewhat) navigable for visually impaired people. This "phone" has all those same tools at its disposal.

Many blind people are already successfully using iPhones. The experience could be better of course, but many apps work really well (I will admit I haven't tried FB Messenger, and don't currently have an iPhone to hand).

This would actually create a nice loop, and it would (hopefully) make app Devs take supporting blind users more seriously.

What makes a phone a smart phone? I don't think many would argue that the Motorola flip phone I had in the early 2000s was a smart phone, but it had games, a (primitive) web browser, and of course could text and make calls. When the iPhone came out it was clearly something different from my flip phone. It had a relatively large screen, fast processor, usable web browser, and importantly a flourishing app ecosystem.

To me this device resembles my Motorola flip a lot more than it resembles Apple's iPhone. And that's fine, but let's not try to stretch an already nebulous term beyond all recognition.

IPhone didn't even have apps when it came out. Your Motorola flip phone was more of a smartphone, feature wise, then the first iPhone.

Even with the preinstalled apps there were problems.

In the first ipod touch and iphone there was a flag set to not be able to create events in the calendar app! (Calendar was read-only).

Later updates fixed it but if you had an ipod touch you needed to pay for the update (maybe 15$?).

From my probably faulty memory: “Smartphone” was the first iphone that rendered the “normal” internet.

I remember it being huge that you could do that and pinch and zoom rather than use a d pad to walk around a bad render of a webpage.

"Smartphone" was a thing long before first iphone. You're right about rendering normal websites being revolutionary, though. Pretty much all smartphones before that only displayed (relatively rare) WAP/WML sites. Those were pain to both use and make:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol#...

Those pages were friggin awesome when I used them in Korea and Japan though. WAP in Japan was way better than the full web on an iPhone in 2008, anyway. I don't think the USA really caught up until 2010 or so

That wasn't the demarcation line either: late feature phones (when they were already called that, because smartphones were very much a thing already) had surprisingly capable browsers (and Wi-Fi, and GPS, and external memory). I already became a web community addict on my Sony Elm. The difference was all about user-installable apps beyond what was offered by J2ME, since what already felt like eons ago.

Post-iPhone that demarcation got muddled a bit by touch-driven UI and the occasional touchscreen feature-phone will be considered a basic "smartphone" by many, but in the historical context when that distinction still mattered it was all about the installables, and J2ME did not count.

PS: neighbor poster reminds us that the iPhone at first did not have user installable apps either, I guess that could be seen as muddling my demarcation line even more. But on the other hand the reality was that when it happened, the iPhone was so much a standout that nobody really cared where it would fit in the emerging field of mobile phone classifications, it was just The iPhone. And iirc "smartphone" as a term wasn't quite as established as we like to think it was, the conceptual bound were more clear than the name. When "smartphone" eventually emerged as the definitive shared superclass of iPhones and Android devices it inherited almost accidentally (and there's-an-app-for-that era Apple did not try too hard pointing out that inaccuracy...)

I used a PDA for a phone and that was pretty much a smart phone but slightly thicker. I didn't get the hype about the iPhone because all the fancy features it had just seemed to be on my phone already.

Mobile websites went through a phase where everything looked like iPhone menus for a while and that was often quite annoying because I was used to just reading normal web pages, even if they were often slow.

I think the iPhone made an important change in that it was significantly more powerful (and expensive!) than most phones people used. These devices were out there and they had been for years, but Apple normalised spending ever increasing sums of money on a phone.

The pre-chasm definition was “phone with an OS(and run apps)”. Common phones before iOS did not have an OS, as in, had no explicit consumer facing branding for its OS.

Likely because of interoperability of J2ME apps between segments and brands? Apps like WhatsApp worked just as well on Nokia's offerings as they would on Sony Ericsson's.

On the Nokia side, Symbian S60 vs S40 indicated the distinction, with the former usually implying a ton of first-party features and a native SDK for apps that could offer functionality beyond the J2ME API limitations.

Windows Mobile also went through several revisions before we got to 2007. I believe Nokia had a few releases in the PDA form-factor as well, but the only real value-add there was being able to use webpages made for the desktop.

BlackBerry/bbOS predates iOS & Android, too.

Palm had a close call.

Many Palm OS devices came increasingly really close to a smartphone/iPhone concept and experience, especially when paired with a GPRS phone (over RS232, IRDA).

Handspring/Palm Treo (e.g Treo 180g) was probably the closest thing to the iPhone concept on many levels.

Had some Palm III, then a Sony Clié SJ30, and finally a Palm LifeDrive, when the iPhone was announced it felt like the most natural evolution (and actually with the first one two steps forward yet a step back because PalmOS had a wonderful app ecosystem)

I believe at some point the distinction was that smartphones have a separate application processor for user-facing stuff (GUI apps, graphical environment, higher-level network protocols) aside from broadband processor that dealt with signal processing and low-level network protocols. Might not be true anymore.

As someone else stated: "'Smartphone' was a thing long before first iphone."

I remember a college friend of mine playing games on his "smartphone" while sitting on the toilet in 2002. (The iPhone came out in 2007.)

His phone ran Windows CE, and I think it even had a browser on it. I even remember going out to look at "smartphones" in 2003, and later in 2005, and just being generally disappointed. The one that I looked at in 2003 was too expensive and clunky, (I was a college student on a budget,) and the one that I looked at in 2005 was too hard to figure out how to use. (Windows CE).

Ballmer's criticism of the first iPhone was that Microsoft had been shipping almost the same thing on phones with Windows CE for quite a few years. The big difference was the UI: The iPhone was a touchscreen and easy to figure out; Windows CE was difficult to figure out and used a stylus.

Exactly. Before "smartphone" the terms used for handheld mini computers were "Pocket PC" and "PDA". And they were truly impressive in terms od capabilities: they had web browsers, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, music software, games etc. Major pain point - stylus was a must due to interface strongly based on Windows. I miss them though.

I think there is still alot of very interesting and uderexplored territory in the area of audio user interfaces, and I hope there is more interest in this now that the novelty of screens is finally wearing off.

For example there are spatial audio libraries that can make sounds apparently originate from any location for a user wearing headphones. Why not use that to create a spatial user interface?

Speech-based interfaces are of course very important, but i feel like there could be much faster ways of doing "window management" or diving through standard menus by using synthesized sounds for feedback. This would be attempting to go a step beyond just playing a sample or sound effect, and conveying more detailed information with different aspects of sound texture.

One of the biggest advantages of screens is that they also act like short-term memory. I don't need to remember where I am in a document because the scroll bar holds that information, for example. I feel like it should be possible to do an equivalent thing with audio-only without it becoming overwhelming. Our ears can take in about as much information as our eyes, and we can also "switch focus" and ignore background sounds when not immediately relevant. I don't know of any projects that seriously attempt to do this, unfortunately.

I would expect to only be able to position a sound along the 2D left to right line with stereo (although I don't know much about audio processing). Maybe if the head position was tracked?

I can't imagine providing much state to the ears constantly, monitors are pretty information rich... but maybe we could get ed in our ears. It is the standard editor...

spatial audio makes use of psychoacoustics to make sound a seem to be coming from your front or back as well. basically, your ears/head act as a low pass filter, so a familiar sound with more high end will seem to be coming from more in front of you compared to the same sound with less high end.

Emphasis on "familiar", it works well if you have a baseline expectation and not at all without.

Take a look at https://supperware.co.uk/ - head tracking specifically to enable 3D audio.

Ah, neat. I've been wondering if we had good enough low-latency audio for this sort of thing for a while now...

I add to "One of the biggest advantages of screens": I could find this comment of yours in seconds instead of having to listen for a long time to all the comments before it. HN would be totally useless except for the list of links in the home page. Anyone using screen readers can prove me wrong, I really do hope I am.

The Papa Sangre [1] video games had basically no UI and relied only on spatial audio, sadly I never got to try them (Apple pulled them from the appstore when they broke backwards compatibility).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_Sangre

> A SIM stands for security information management

Subscriber Identity Module?

Yep: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_card>

It looks like the writer mixed up SIM cards (subscriber identity module card) with the unrelated practice of security information management (SIM).

I try not to complain about people's word choices, and I do believe words are defined by the way we use them, but when they went on to say it made the device data driven, it was like nails on chalkboard to me.

Can't expect much from what's basically a paid advertisement?

Article: "VICE may receive a commission if you buy products through the links on our site."

Article: (proceeds to include a dozen unique-looking links which actually all go to the same exact analytics/tracking/shortening/affiliate link)

If you want a smartphone with a screen but without all the distracting crap, maybe try a light phone (no relationship, just considering one for myself)

https://www.thelightphone.com/

I like the light phone design (I’m a e-ink fanboy tbf).

But I can’t get over the fact that this is just a glorified $29 dumb phone with a e-ink screen for ten times the price.

yeah we shuould get one that that is like the old nokia with more memory for messages. This is too expensive, and 4G and other internet stuff also doesn't help. Rather have a phone where I can call and message.

the new nokia 3310 has what you want

itt has 3g. I would say the old phone by NOT having internet is a feature.

I was looking in that direction, but even the 'smart' dumb phones like this are too limited (I seem to need 5 different messaging apps these days... and navigation, and a few other things) The UniHertz Jelly seems to tread a nice middle ground in that it's got too tiny a screen (about a third to a quarter of the size of a modern smartphone) for casual reading and distracting crap, but fully featured Android for the things you need. I only wish it had a keyboard better designed for the screen size. I thought I'd use voice typing a lot more, but can't convince myself to talk to the machine...

Now make this but a smart watch, and use the small screen as another way to access features. The current smart watches are either too complicated trying to add all features of a regular phone, or need a phone to be paired with. I thought this wearable tech would go in the direction away from smart phones like this one.

We keep making phones bigger and they’re turning into tablets.

I have at least two screens with me at all times and that’s kind of the limit for me. Put the phone in the watch and bring back the iPod.

You might be interested in PineTime, open-source smartwatch.

The first Apple Watch that came with a cellular chip (gen 4?) got me excited to basically do just this. Except 1) the battery life was 1 hour for phone calls 2) charging meant not wearing it 3) voice-to-text is still very spotty for me 4) still needed a smartphone with a cellular plan associated with the Watch.

I just want a wearable that allows me to communicate with people, and get basic info from the web like weather. And that has better battery life. Here’s hoping…

My Apple Watch SE is just this. I never carry a phone with me and it is glorious. One day, when I can provision an Apple Watch merely via eSIM and not attached to a "main" device, I'll not own an iPhone.

For a screenless smartphone turn on voiceover[1] and enable screen curtain[2] and you’re there. It’s better than anything that some newcomer is going to be able to cook up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDm7GiKra28

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iph3e2e415f/ios [2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443

I wonder how easy you could make a smartphone for the visually impaired last for ages if you just remove the screen. Make them glass rocks with speakers that run Android (or iOS but it's not like Apple will ever permit such modifications). Paradigms like flat screens and even the base shape don't matter as long as the OS audio feedback is done well.

You could give someone a smooth rock and they'd be able to use it as a smartphone no problem as long as you put on a normal OS (none of this locked down bullshit) and integrate the existing accessibility service well. There'd be loads of space for batteries and you only need to care about the limits if the capacitive layer, the screen tech itself doesn't need to be foldable!

Perhaps for tech service you'd need to add some kind of display out, probably over USB so you have hook it up to a hub and have a non-impaired techy service it if necessary, but there are opportunities here way beyond "just buy a screen you'll never be able to see".

Sounds like a lot of work to end up with something very inferior.

The iphone’s accessibility works because it’s a core part of a device intended for anyone - not a weird bespoke ‘here is your blind phone’ device.

But an iPhone contains a screen and several cameras that someone without eye sight will ever use. There's a cool service that describes objects and clothes for the visually impaired but that doesn't need four cameras.

Regardless of how well-integrated the accessibility service is, it's accessibility tacked onto a device designed primarily for the common denominator. The system is oriented around communicating what's on the screen but the screen itself is an artificial limitation for those that don't see it.

A well-built accessible device like this should also work for people with good eye sight, as long as they have good hearing. Screens are distracting and attention grabbing, apps and websites are designed to suck up as much of your time as they possibly can, which is a reason many people use accessibility settings to set their screen to grayscale for example.

Portable smart speakers can be one solution for a world where everything tries to ruin your attention span by grabbing your attention. Combine the mobile app market and a novel design and you should be able to get a decent experience as long as the "accessibility" software is written well.

Sure, such a device would be fiddly for those that don't need accessibility per se, but I think a well designed project can leverage the huge mindscape that blind people navigating the world can develop to create human-device interactions that go beyond "here's a way to also use the thing developed for sighted people".

I don’t wish to be rude because your heart is in the right place but you seem to be speaking very heavily on behalf of blind people about what they do or do not need. Do you have any blind people in your life?

Blind people use cameras all the time for the same reasons sighted people do - sharing images with others! They have sighted friends and family too you know :)

Blind people want the choice to use all the same apps and experiences that sighted people do with their benefits and pitfalls. This is only achievable with accessibility baked in to an established platform - which iOS accessibility is, it’s certainly not ‘tacked on’. The marginal cost of a screen is so irrelevant.

In many ways what I’m saying is the same as any new entrant to the smart devices market - if it doesn’t use one of the two established ecosystems it’ll be marginally useful at best. For better or worse it’s iOS/Android from here on out.

This reminds me of some of the systems that Thad Starner and Steve Mann came up with at MIT Media Lab in the early days of wearables. Audio first was attractive because the displays were bulky, expensive, and lo-res.

I remember seeing Thad walking around MIT with his wearables on and thinking "Hey, that's weird."

Who'd thunk it; we're all weird now.

Proud to be weird :) have a great weekend

EarPods (or other Bluetooth earbuds) + Siri can do most of what this wants to do. Sure, you need the phone in your pocket… but I don’t think I would go anywhere without it anyway. I always need Google maps or something. I also like to use Siri to add tasks to my ToDoist. Unless this thing adds third party apps at a remarkable speed, iOS/Android are always going to be in prime position to dominate this use case. This is likely going to be a niche “kickstarter”-like product that’s never going to cross the chasm.

I like this! I feel like there are a lot of HCI challenges to make a screen less phone that is useful and intuitive though.

Pebble tried something similar with the pebble core, not sure what happened to it: https://www.techradar.com/news/wearables/pebble-core-everyth...

Pebble Core got killed at the same time Pebble got killed in the Fitbit acquisition. I was excited for a super-tiny Android cube I could carry on my keys and write a few apps for.

I'm assuming this thing's running Android under the hood and someone will figure out how to hack the hell out of it.

Want a screenless iPhone?

1. Triple press the side button if you have Face ID or the home button if not. This will turn on VoiceOver. 2. Tap the screen three times with three fingers to enable screen curtain. This will disable your screen with the exception of VoiceOver. 3. Same steps to turn these features off.

If you can learn how to use your phone with VoiceOver and the screen curtain, you will now get ~4 days of battery life.

>Titan is a set of eSim-enabled, voice controlled earbuds with embedded live voice translation.

Yeah, I'm out.

Could not tell you the amount of times that Siri has misunderstood me due to my accent, or Google Maps voice guidance has tried to summon eldricht horrors by attempting to pronounce "Länsiväylä". Voice is an awful interface and should not be a main/easiest way of interacting with any device.

This will probably be one of those devices that will only work for Americans in America speaking American English in a particular accent. Maybe some Canadians too, if the voice reconigition is particularly good. Many English speakers like the British or, God forbid, the Scottish will be treated as if they speak an entirely different language.

I find Google's natural language AI extremely lacking in Dutch but I'm not switching languages to get my phone to do what I want it to do. I need to say broken sentences to get reminders to work right (the equivalent of "OK Google, remind me at 9 turn on washing machine" because any connecting words between the command and the input will be parsed as part of the input).

At least Google Assistant seems to work better than Siri, but I'm not sure if that's because Google's AI is better or if Apple's is just worse. If Google can't get it right, their tiny competitor will never be able to get this working outside their tiny target area.

This article has a competence level that rivals the PC building guide by The Verge. What happened? How in the world does any tech writer use the wrong definition of SIM, among other mistakes?

Vice, if you are reading this, I could write you a better article in 30 minutes. I have IT certifications and a certification in Writing, which is more than your writers.

Every single time something like this pops up nobody seems to care that there are people who don't feel comfortable having other people around listening to their conversation, browsing and whatever is controlled by voice. There is a reason screens are still popular.

It’s like the movie Her.

I do feel like we just lost a generation worth of “calling” skills with people somehow surprised when you just call and start talking. I wonder if we can get that back.

I’ve been mulling over ideas like this for a while. What if the metaverse is actually primarily audio, without all this 3D, VR headset bullshit? Earbuds are incredibly widely deployed but outside of the initial surge of interest in assistants like Siri it doesn’t feel like they’ve been treated as a platform in a serious way.

> Earbuds are incredibly widely deployed [...] it doesn’t feel like they’ve been treated as a platform in a serious way.

That's because the earbuds are not a platform in themselves, you can't run stuff on just the earbuds. They are connected to something, which is the platform, and outputs audio from what the platform tells them to.

So unless we come up with earbuds that have built-in computers, they'll remain an accessory to platforms and won't become platforms themselves.

I phrased that badly, I really just mean audio as the platform, but I wanted to highlight that people have headphones and earbuds, are happy to wear them for long periods of time either at work or outside, and in a lot of cases have home devices with audio interfaces. When people try to push a vision of the metaverse as some embodied experience across multiple services and devices, with more ambient interactions with people and data, I genuinely think you'd get more mileage dreaming up new audio services to fulfil this rather than janky 3D stuff requiring a headset nobody wants to wear. I don't think it takes an audio only device such as the one linked to be able to envision audio-first interfaces that are better than the current generation of very limited and disjointed assistants.

For an actual 'screenless smartphone' look at the movie 'The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest'

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280674/

Was thinking Her 2013 regarding spoken commands and audio AI.

Granted they do have a phone in the movie.

Interesting movie you posted (old) haven't seen it will put it on my watch list.

Reminds me of the LightPhone -- different approach but addressing a similar problem.

It seems like a standalone Siri assistant, I don't know if you can define it as a "smartphone". Anyway, I don't know precisely why, but I never feel good to use a voice assistant in public

I too don't feel good using a voice assistant in public and I know many more people with the same feeling. I don't know why so many on HN seem to forget this.

It might be a cool proof of concept project.

Frankly I'm never remotely seeing this as a successful product though (from a business perspective), a niche hype at best.

> The Rec Room staff independently selected all of the stuff featured in this story.

From how large a selection?

I remember calling goog411 with my dumb phone...good times

No games, no tiktok? It won't be a success. And good luck spelling out your passwords.

> (A SIM stands for security information management, and traditionally collects, monitors, and analyzes security-related data.) Said another way: It’s the thing that helps make your smartphone a connected, data-driven device.

That’s the worst definition of SIM that I’ve seen in my life.

The author is a vice journalist.

I have a 24 hour a day Freedom session going blocking all news and social media sites. This has really helped me turn the corner from addiction to having a heathier, more minimal relationship to my phone! https://freedom.to

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