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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.
... we reached peak laptop 5 years ago and peak desktop almost 10 years ago. Mature products, mature market. I'm not certain people would pay for a release that just improved stability and battery life, so expect some dodgy "features" over the next year or three.
At this point I don't upgrade to a new phone until the battery on my existing one becomes useless and I can't find a replacement. There hasn't been a compelling phone feature to me for quite a while. Screen resolution, camera, CPU, data speeds are all at a good enough place. The last really cool feature for me was wireless charging.
I said much the same thing on TeleRead. There are many, many devices and things that haven't "advanced" in decades but are a such a quiet everyday part of our lives that we couldn't imagine doing without them. Smartphones (and their close relations tablets and e-readers) are becoming just like that. Not everything in our lives has to be replaced by something shiny and new every couple of years.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
As an Android user, the main thing I want now from a smartphone is regular updates (chiefly, security). As far as I can tell, only Google is committed to regular security updates for all their recent devices. Actually, I think Samsung might be doing so as well, but only for the S6 and S7. Stagefright was a major wakeup call for Android partners, but it seems that, after the dust settled, the OEMs have returned to the old "just buy a new phone" approach to solving the problem. Mind you, Joe Sixpack really doesn't seem bothered. Or maybe just not clued up.
I'm planning on grabbing the next Nexus when it arrives, hopefully with a 64GB option or an SD card slot, so I can benefit from the monthly security patches. I can only see attacks against smartphones increasing both in volume and sophistication, now that we've peaked and almost everyone has one.
Bluetooth keyboard is only OK as long as it is TOHKBD style - that is integrated with the phone as a single piece of hardware with no extra battery charging. And then the bluetooth part is only an implementation detail, probably a useless one as if they can connect the power wires they could connect even the signals. Keyboard shortcuts are always faster than any mouse/swipe/whatever crap. And no voice typing really makes sense on a busy street. Besides that I cannot imagine to voice type a bash command with all its backquotes. Typing on integrated QWERTY worked great for me on Nokia 9000i, Nokia 9110 and Nokia 900, I have no idea why it can no longer work. I need to get the job done, I do not need a star-trek-looking useless gadget.
Reception is a carrier's problem, not a phones.
And people would rather have a big battery with 2 hour life than a small battery with a 2 week run time. At least, that's how it looks from reading reviews.
The endgoal for battery life is 0 battery life, and chargers everywhere. A wireless charger everywhere. In the car, at home, at work, stores, for guests in offices, everywhere. You don't need to have a battery if it's powered everywhere, and for camping, you take a power pack.
Learn to love Alaska
Let me help you a bit.
1. SIP really is just the command channel protocol. What you are probably talking about when you say SIP is the combination of the SIP control channel and a RTP audio payload.
2. SIP can and does run as both UDP and TCP. There is a popular Microsoft SIP stack that actually gave up on the UDP side of SIP as there were too many issues with it in a home (AKA poorly maintained) environments.
3. RTP runs as UDP (well I know of some related TCP projects but the whole concept is just stupid) as TCP is wildly unsuited for a real-time connection protocol.
4. Studies show that unbuffered jitter greater than 2ms or latency of greater than 100ms rapidly make phone calls unmanageable for human users. There is a direct trade-off (via buffering) between jitter and latency, however TCP makes both worse which is why nobody would use it like this.
5. If you want to see quality compare SIP with the G.729 codex (probably what you are using) vs the POTS system (normal telephony) vs a wide-band SIP codex like G.722. If you can spare the bandwidth it really is impressive how nice it sounds.
So, any communication method that relies on low latency and reliable delivery with the "other side of the planet" is going to suck. I would suggest that you move to video as some studies have shown that people tend to be happier with video calls when there are technical glitches as they are able to correct some of it with the associated visual queues.