Motorola Building "Self-Aware" Smartphone

Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in the ancient days of 2009, Motorola Mobility earned considerable buzz with its Droid smartphone. Marketed as an iPhone alternative, the device featured a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a chunky black body that seemed positively Schwarzenegger-esque in comparison to its svelte Apple rival. But Motorola failed to translate that buzz into sustained momentum in the smartphone space. Instead, Samsung became the dominant Android smartphone manufacturer, battling toe-to-toe with Apple for market-share and profits. Even Google acquiring Motorola for the princely sum of $12.1 billion didn't really seem to alter the equation very much. Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside wants to change all that. In a May 29 talk at AllThingsD's D11 conference, he told the audience that Motorola has a 'hero phone' in the works, dubbed the Moto X—and that it's self-aware. 'It anticipates my needs,' he said, according to AllThingD's live blog of the event. But what does that actually mean? Thanks to embedded sensors, the phone knows when the user removes it from his or her pocket; in theory, that capability could serve broader applications, such as the phone recognizing where the user is located within a city and serving up content and applications accordingly. In fact, it sounds a bit like Google Now on steroids—or like the smartphone precursor to SkyNet, the supercomputer from the Terminator movies that's so intelligent, it decides that the world would be better off if it ruled over humanity."

Comments

It will have high return rates

[Spy Handler]

When the customer buys one and turns it on for the first time, it start noticing its surroundings and its owner. Pretty soon it will brick itself out of despair and the customer will be left with a dead phone.

Self aware - blah

[ickleberry]

Just from reading TFS, nothing that can't be achieved presently with a well-written bash (or python) script. Self-aware me bollox, phone probably can't recognise it's own plastic Chinese mass manufactured casing in a photograph

I always lol when I see the big hype drummed up when yesteryear's nerd-tech goes mainstream

Skip the gimmicks, focus on the 4 pillars:

[Scot Seese]

Battery Life
Camera quality
Display quality / size sweet spot
Build quality / hand feel ..and a huge asterisk added to the end: Strip your shitty bloatware "custom UI" off it and leave it stock Android.

Re:Summary

[YukariHirai]

All the current mainstream smartphones could do that if they wanted to but most people don't seem to want their phones deciding when to turn themselves on.

Basically, yeah. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of my phone making decisions on its own. On paper it sounds like a good idea to have your devices anticipate your needs and do things to minimise how much you need to manually operate them, but these things at best never quite work right, usually get something or other hilariously wrong, and at worst entirely fuck everything up.

And in any case... if we're talking inconveniences we must eliminate, needing to press a button on my phone and drag a finger across its screen before I use it for something is pretty far down the priority list. Likewise needing to scroll across a screen to launch the app I want. If it was something that I could program some "do not disturb" hours into and have it automatically reject any incoming calls during those hours (after ringing briefly so I'm not completely oblivious that someone's tried to contact me), then that'd be something I'd like. Or if I could set up some home automation and the phone could log in and switch things on when it detects I'm almost home (probably possible now as a DIY project, but requiring more electronics and programming skill than I have).