The Case For a Safer Smartphone

itwbennett writes: "According to the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, people who text and drive increase their chances of 'safety-critical events' by a multiple of 23.2. And new research is constantly rolling out, showing the same thing: 'We can't handle the visual, manual, and cognitive commitment of using a phone while driving,' writes blogger Kevin Purdy. What's needed, Purdy suggests, isn't more laws that will go ignored, but phones that know enough to stop giving us the distractions we ask them for: 'I think the next good phone, the next phone that makes some variant of the claim that it "Fits the way you live," needs to know that we don't know what is good for us when it comes to driving. We want to be entertained and shown new things while doing the often mundane or stressful task of driving. More specifically, those phones should know when we are driving, quiet or otherwise obscure updates from most apps, and be able to offer their most basic functions without needing to turn on a screen or type a single letter.'"

Comments

Time has come to programmatically disable features

[JoeyRox]

I never thought I would be a person to advocate a law to restrict personal freedoms but I think it's time to require smartphone vendors to disable texting when driving speeds are detected. This is not about protecting people from themselves but about protecting other people [on the road]. Texting while driving is unbelievably dangerous. I'm sure someone can come up with way to differentiate a driver from a passenger so that passengers can still be permitted to text. If not then so be it.