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Slashdot Asks: Does It Matter That We've Reached Peak Smartphone?
Gizmodo, in its typical sensational voice, ran a story this week in which it argues that smartphones are in a "ridiculously boring place" right now. Alex Cranz with the publication expresses her discontent with some of the recently launched smartphones such as the iPhone SE, the LG G5, and the Galaxy S7. "These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life. Each of these new phones is merely a marginal improvement over last year's model." I agree with most of what Cranz has to say. In the past one year, we've seen QHD display panel, Snapdragon 810/820 SoC, 3 to 4GB of RAM becoming a norm. Nearly every manufacturer has reached that point, and then sort of stopped there. Compared to the Nexus 4, for instance, the Nexus 6P offers a significant improvement. But when compared to anything you purchased two years ago -- in the echelon of your choice -- the latest offering isn't going to leave a big impression on you. The industry is currently making small noises about what it thinks could be the next big thing. Some players including Samsung and Lenovo believe that it could be the virtual reality addon. We will have to see how much traction that gets.
My contention with Cranz's story is that it doesn't talk about how these devices are impacting people's lives, hence missing the big picture. I believe that it doesn't necessarily matter if our smartphones aren't going to get any smarter. The first-generation Moto G, from a few years ago, can also help you quickly get information from the Web, and it can also allow you to book a cab using Uber app, and do pretty much everything that you do on a flagship smartphone. As Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson pointed out last month, the next "second smartphone revolution" could enhance the lives of millions of people in places such as Asia, where most of the population still doesn't have a smartphone. When you look at that, it becomes unnecessary to talk about the top-of-the-line specs and the rate at which these smartphones are receiving incremental improvements. The vast majority of people in the emerging world are in a desperate need of a bare-bone smartphone that allows them to make phone calls, even if it doesn't do it in a "redefined" fashion, and works with speeds that don't blow them away, a couple of things that I think we are taking for granted. Wilson wrote: The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, WhatsApp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class mobile apps and move their userbases from web to mobile. But, if you stare at the top 200 non-game mobile apps in the US (and most of the western hemisphere) you will see that the list doesn't look that different than the top 200 websites. The mobile revolution from 2007 to 2015 in the west was more about how we accessed the internet than what apps we used, with some notable and important exceptions. The next 2.5bn people to adopt smartphones may turn out to be a different story. They will mostly live outside the developed and wealthy parts of the world and they will look to their smartphones to deliver essential services that they have not been receiving at all -- from the web or from the offline world. I am thinking about financial services, healthcare services, educational services, transportation services, and the like. Stuff that matters a bit more than seeing where you friends had a fun time last night or what it looks like when you faceswap with your sister.At this moment, it does seem to me that over the coming months, our smartphones are unlikely to get a major hardware boost. The biggest milestone we have on the horizon is what happens when everyone has these smartphones, and how does it impact our businesses, culture, and social lives. What's your take on this? Do you think we are yet to reach the peak point in the smartphone world? What's the big picture in your opinion?Update: 04/23 18:55 GMT by M :Robotech_Master's take on this is pretty insightful.
My contention with Cranz's story is that it doesn't talk about how these devices are impacting people's lives, hence missing the big picture. I believe that it doesn't necessarily matter if our smartphones aren't going to get any smarter. The first-generation Moto G, from a few years ago, can also help you quickly get information from the Web, and it can also allow you to book a cab using Uber app, and do pretty much everything that you do on a flagship smartphone. As Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson pointed out last month, the next "second smartphone revolution" could enhance the lives of millions of people in places such as Asia, where most of the population still doesn't have a smartphone. When you look at that, it becomes unnecessary to talk about the top-of-the-line specs and the rate at which these smartphones are receiving incremental improvements. The vast majority of people in the emerging world are in a desperate need of a bare-bone smartphone that allows them to make phone calls, even if it doesn't do it in a "redefined" fashion, and works with speeds that don't blow them away, a couple of things that I think we are taking for granted. Wilson wrote: The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, WhatsApp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class mobile apps and move their userbases from web to mobile. But, if you stare at the top 200 non-game mobile apps in the US (and most of the western hemisphere) you will see that the list doesn't look that different than the top 200 websites. The mobile revolution from 2007 to 2015 in the west was more about how we accessed the internet than what apps we used, with some notable and important exceptions. The next 2.5bn people to adopt smartphones may turn out to be a different story. They will mostly live outside the developed and wealthy parts of the world and they will look to their smartphones to deliver essential services that they have not been receiving at all -- from the web or from the offline world. I am thinking about financial services, healthcare services, educational services, transportation services, and the like. Stuff that matters a bit more than seeing where you friends had a fun time last night or what it looks like when you faceswap with your sister.At this moment, it does seem to me that over the coming months, our smartphones are unlikely to get a major hardware boost. The biggest milestone we have on the horizon is what happens when everyone has these smartphones, and how does it impact our businesses, culture, and social lives. What's your take on this? Do you think we are yet to reach the peak point in the smartphone world? What's the big picture in your opinion?Update: 04/23 18:55 GMT by M :Robotech_Master's take on this is pretty insightful.
Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them. Maybe the smartphone manufacturers could concentrate on the audio quality and intelligibility of phone conversations using their equipment...
I don't think we've hit peak smartphone, but we're at a plateau. The next steps will be three things:
1. Reduced cost and improved durability, bringing smartphones to those areas of the world that currently can't afford them.
2. Improved battery life. That's going to come from battery tech, not the phone side.
3. Augmented reality. Not virtual reality, but something like Google Glass that can use the entire surface of the lens as a display instead of just a small chunk in a corner.
After all of these years, volume controls on phones still suck ass. The physical buttons are on the edge of the phone and you either butt-mute and butt-blare your phone all day long, or they're stupid hard to press and you can't tell without looking at the phone whether your change has even taken. On top of that, some apps "steal" the buttons, so you're never sure whether you're actually adjusting the volume or talking to the app.
On top of that, there are actually multiple settings, i.e., for ringer volume, media volume, etc. And some apps seem to have their own "private" volume setting that is only adjustable when the app is in the foreground. Or when the app _thinks_ it's in the foreground. Or when the OS has stopped lagging and gets around to thinking it's in the foreground.
And don't forget about headphones. Various things behave differently if headphones are plugged in. Some sounds go to the headphones and others continue to come out of the phone, for no obvious reason.
All of that assumes that you haven't tripped over the various OS bugs that make the volume unchangeable, etc.
So yeah, I still have a few hundred $$$ burning a hole in my pocket for any manufacturer that can solve this problem.
There already were smartphones with QWERTY (incl. arrows, numeric row etc. - suitable for programming/VIM, not just for SMSes). There is no longer any single one QWERTY manufactured. There is probably still a long way ahead before we can see a usable phone when they still cannot get the QWERTY there.
It's long been true that one could buy a phone similar to last-year's model at a reasonable cost. Since there haven't been any radical improvements for a few years, there's no longer any reason to spend $650 on the hottest new thing. No reason to replace a phone that works fine, and when you do need a new phone the $120 model will do fine.
That shift has several effects, one of which is that carrier subsidies on phone purchases, in which the buyer pays for the $650 phone through a higher monthly bill on contract, have become kinda pointless. No reason not to buy a $120 phone up-front, then get $30 service with no contract.
Smartphones made a leap with installable apps, now they need to enable installable operating systems. We're currently in a phase where large parts of the OS are reinvented with every generation of smartphones, much how previously features like phone book, sms entry, and synchronization were new in every new phone (and came with new oddities and bugs), even from the same manufacturer. The ARM world needs to become a platform instead of a loose arrangement of components. Until you can buy a phone without OS and choose the software separately, the manufacturers will be overwhelmed with maintaining the base line of features and have no time and resources left for innovation.
Time to actually write something of substance.
I agree with the story. I'm a die hard corporate blackberry user. The only other phone I've ever owned is the iphone 3GS and that was because at the time _everyone_ in the office had one. You couldn't attend a meeting without someone talking about it.
Fast forward to the S7 and Android. The phone itself is sleek, and looks nice, but it ends there. Ergonomically it's a nightmare for me. Security is also a nightmare. RF is weak. For a phone costing over $1000 Canadian, I'm not impressed.
I'm still not sure where to post this, dumping a wall of text on Slashdot isn't exactly ideal but the phone has never seen the public network. Since the day I got it (last Tuesday), it's had a sim with no data and on a completely isolated wireless network for observation. What I've found is absolutely absurd. It's not only call home happy but it's like the neighborhood hoe. It won't stop broadcasting for benign things (DNS and multicast for the most part). I've disabled everything I can short of rooting the phone and I've not accepted _any_ TOS or license for anything (including Google nor Facebook), yet it persists. In a futile attempt to further isolate the phone it's now sitting on a VPN.. which it's ignoring for some hosts like connectivitycheck.android.com, but also more disturbingly external DNS. A lot of the call home garbage appears to be Samsung and Google, there is also some to odd places like Broadcom.
Phones out right now are largely snakeoil. It's no wonder so few sites "review" anything but how the phone looks or the stupid cameras. I couldn't find any doing even basic reception tests. Few show Email clients or the phone UI much at all. Some even consider the abysmal battery to be normal. Charging a phone nightly is NOT NORMAL.
Actually, tech writers all but wrote off PCs a few years ago, declaring it a dead or dying platform. From what I can see, PCs just settled into a more specialized role as content creation platforms, contrary to phones, tablets, and consoles, which are more suited for content consumption.
Still, it's probably only the tech media (and manufacturers, of course) that are really worried about this, because they're the ones who write about smartphones. So, there's a built-in bias regarding the desired interest in seeing new and shiny devices coming out each year, because that interest is tied to their ability to earn a living writing about those devices. How many people get all excited about a new model of oven ranges or refrigerators? It must terrify tech writers to think about smartphones becoming as mundane as other appliances.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Modern smartphones are already as powerful as 5-7 old PCs yet they consume roughly 100 times less power.
Pure bullshit. Try compressing 1 gig of data using LZMA compression and watch a 7 year old PC leave the smartphone in the dust. Smartphones still don't have the data processing power and bandwidth of even a machine that's a decade old. You just don't notice that when you're playing Angry Birds or surfing Facebook.
For most people, we reached 'peak desktop' when SSD's became widespread and cheap enough to be the primary drive in a reasonable system. They're using their PC for web browsing and not much else. In the PC side of the equation, we still have to make the jump to high resolution displays. Apple might me there already but the majority of Windows users are still at the same 1920x1080 resolution they were 5 years ago.