People always try to make this argument but it can't really be denied that it's a slightly different situation having a handheld utility you can pull out vs being 'strapped in' and disconnected from the world for hours at a time.

I'm sure there will be some valid usecases that come up, but the difference here is they've entered an established market which was already about as far as it was going to go. Using more premium screens, lenses, finishes and throwing more power at it doesn't change the overall concept of how it works, and why it's not been more widely adopted.

Augmented reality is more likely to be the one that takes off. If you lose that 'disconnect' feeling and package it in a pair of normal looking glasses and it'll become mainstream, the tech's just not there yet to do it in an affordable package.

Someone from the 80s wouldn't even have had a beeper to know when someone was trying to contact them, and would need to have a bunch of quarters on hand to use at pay phones.

You're jumping 2-3 generations back to defend as-yet-undefined use cases for $3500 bauble.

Well exactly. Creating smartphone in 80s with vision of smartphone from 2020 would not work, because that technology was not there. It would be big, heavy, expensive, mostly without software and basically without connectivity.

Look at AR/VR today - big, heavy, expensive and without use-case which would be interesting to masses.

But let's move 20~50 years into future - AR/VR can look like ordinary glasses and cost like cheap smartphone today and you are controlling it by your mind. That's something what would have lot of interesting use cases.

Calendar, address book, calculator. Maybe slightly later dictionary. Access to something like BBS would not be stretch.

Actually smartphone really is 80s idea. Internet is actually only real new thing in it.

They would have a much better idea what to do with VR goggles though, because serious research into that area had already been happening since the 60s (and then had it's first massive consumer hype in the mid-90s).

Also Star Trek NG had both communicators and handheld tablet devices with touch screens. Not a great leap from there to modern smartphones.

Envisioned in 1968 proposed in 1972: Alan Kay 'demo's Dynabook[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r36NNGzNvjo

Show them the practically unlimited camera roll and say you can call people from anywhere and they'd think you were a wizard.

Lol. So people in the 80s wouldn't find useful a pocket-sized device that you can watch TV on, listen to the radio, listen to music, take photos? The only thing 80s people wouldn't understand is creating content on the Internet. But even digital text content has an 80s equivalent: teletext.

Oh, and don't forget the 80s pocket computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_computer

Well yeah, smartphones lose most of their functionality without the existence of the internet. Just like current AR headsets don't make much sense without a proper "metaverse" for them to link to. Like virtual persistent objects that everyone with the headset can see and interact with, like street signs, notes, etc.

I doubt this will ever exist unless some undiscovered tech makes it seamless though. You can convince the average person to carry a small brick around if it has enough functionality, but not to carry it on their face. Even regular glasses are so annoying to wear that lots of people opt for lenses.