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Comment by cseleborg | Hacker News Reader

I recently landed on beeline's website (GPS navigation devices for motorbikes and bicycles). For bicycles, the tagline was "Simplify your ride".

I strongly disagree. I feel like involving my smartphone into any activity that existed in 1990 (like jogging, or riding a bike) tends to make things more complicated, not less. When I go for a jog wanting to listen to podcasts, battery status, headphones, Bluetooth and playlist ordering are additional complexities that, at the very minimum, add additional steps to the process and, at worst, require several minutes of problem-solving before I can get started.

In my experience, involving a smartphone can, but rarely does, make things simpler.

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You think this because the cases where smartphones are worse stand out more.

Finding businesses that match some profile in the area, finding out that business' hours and offerings, then getting directions there from wherever you currently are -- all MASSIVELY easier on a smartphone compared to doing the same in 1990/pre-web. Doing that stuff with yellow pages and a map was a huge pain in the ass that took forever.

Grabbing a playlist to listen to music on a jog is also way easier in the age of music subscriptions and smartphones, compared to going around with a walkman+tape, especially if you factor in getting variety in song choice.

Also, remember communicating with people at arbitrary times? If they're at home, that's fairly safe, though if you're not home you may need to find a payphone. But if they're away from home on errands, lol, good fucking luck getting a message to them.

>Finding businesses ...

Finding information about just about anything pre-Web was massively harder. Sources were limited, physical, probably out-of-date, etc. This isn't a smartphone thing as such unless you're talking about real-time discovery while you're not at home. But the smartphone and the real maturation of information sources online were coming together at about the same time.

People forget--or they never knew--what it took to do most kinds of research.

> This isn't a smartphone thing as such unless you're talking about real-time discovery while you're not at home

Right, but at least for me this happens all the time. Especially on trips, but even when I'm in my home area to an extent.

In my experience, involving a smartphone can, but rarely does, make things simpler.

Beeline is an alternative to a paper map, and having seen many people try to navigate with a map I'm pretty sure everyone would agree than a smart phone is massively less complicated.

If you're going on a journey where you wouldn't need a map, just adding in some tech is obviously going to be more complicated than not adding tech.

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