Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

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I'm in my 40s - so I've spent most of my life using "normal" maps.

For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.

I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.

So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.

Without smartphones does not mean using paper maps. It means that featurephones would have eventually converged with offline GPS devices -- the Garmins and TomToms of the world.

In many ways, this would have been a better model for the navigating consumer. GPS devices operated on a one-time purchase model -- no subscription, no contracts, no data caps. Maps were shipped with the device, and many came with free lifetime updates. Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.

There are also broader implications. Without smartphones, AT&T and Verizon would have lost a lucrative revenue stream. Their best choice for deploying capital would have been to build fiber to the home. Not a bad trade -- smartphones for gigabit broadband in every house.

With wireless at a technological plateau, maybe T-Mobile and Sprint could have caught up. Perhaps we'd have seen more robust competition to the duopoly, and lower prices.

This is alternate history. But it's alternate history along the lines of Douglas North, who dared to question the economic benefits of railroads.

That would completely kill public transit navigation, however, which relies on live access to current public transit schedules and tracking data.

As I stated:

> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.

It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.

A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.

It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.

Yep, they would have added more and more features to these increasingly powerful, increasingly generalized electronic devices that fit in your pocket until... Oops, look at that, smartphones all over again.

Today's featurephones have GPS, navigation, mail, IM, sometimes even installable apps. In 2006, we would have considered them smartphones.

If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.

Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.

In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.

I'm afraid not, no. In 2006, a smartphone was something like a Palm Treo or an HTC TyTN. In fact, that's what a smartphone has been for over a decade. Even the price points have remained similar.

The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.

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