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The Mobile Internet Is the Internet (qz.com)
A reader shares a Quartz report: Think back to the mobile phone you had in 2010. It could access the internet, but it wasn't such a great experience. On average, people only spent 20% of their time online on their phones back then, according to Zenith, a media agency. Today, by contrast, we spend around 70% of our time on the internet on phones, based on estimates and forecasts for more than 50 countries covering two-thirds of the world's population. By 2019, Zenith says this will rise to close to 80%. What used to be called "mobile internet" is now just the internet.
It just sucks less. I would still much rather sit in front of my computer if I have the opportunity where I have a much larger screen and a physical keyboard.
I would be interested to see if people are spending that much less time on their computers for internet browsing, or if they are just on the internet more because it's easier now to pull out your mobile phone when you're bored and check your favorite social media sites.
The Mobile Internet Is the Internet
If you are a consumer of crap, someone who lives their life of Facebook, than yes, your mobile phone is the Internet, the way you validate your sad little life.
Other people do other things "on the Internet" that do not revolve around Social Media.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU 4G COWS!!
While I may spend more time on the mobile web -- reading news on the train, etc, it's still way less usable than my computer, so anytime I need more interaction with a site (i.e. purchasing an item, doing research on a subject where I want to reference several tabs, etc), I use my computer.
And I hate the responsive design trend that gives me a watered down experience with functionality either hidden or completely removed from the mobile experience.
the other 30% are blind old farts like me.
Go well
Rapture #1: All the mobile users of the internet are snatched up by God.
Does anyone other than click-steam entrepreneurs even notice their absence?
Rapture #2: All the desktop and workstation users of the internet are snatched up by an advanced alien civilization.
The internet ceases to function in 3, 2, 1 ... 404.
Help desks everywhere begin to return 410 Gone.
#ShitShitShit commences trending on Twitter.
Australia is spending a motza on rolling out a national broadband network.
I'm now wondering if it would have been better to spend that $70B on a next gen LTE rollout. (aka 5G)
46137
It still isn't.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
70% of our time on the internet? No surprise really. People spend their day listening to streaming music, and many people watch movies on their phone.
The other factor is that so many sites which were new and fascinating a decade ago are driving off visitors with crappy content and intrusive advertising.
This story seems tailor made for him...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There is one Internet, regardless of what computing device you use to access it.
The mobile internet is not now "the internet" - the internet runs the mobile internet. And people didn't switch to this because it was "better" they switched to it because now people could charge for "the internet". Oh, you want to access our site on mobile? Then you have to buy our Sh**y app. Or if the app was free, it was so providers could collect even more tracking data on you to give more targeted advertising (now we can advertise the pizza hut next door!). And so they could have in-app ads instead of mere in-browser ads.
I had the pleasure of owning the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) when it was a pretty new thing. The five-row keyboard, trackball, and extra hardware buttons basically meant that I had a tiny "laptop" in my pocket. I used it for VNC. I used it for SSH. I even ran a Debian overlay with X on it just because I could. It made the iPhones look stupid: one button, clunky touch-everything, dumbed down trash.
Then the next phone I ended up with had a four-row keyboard and an optical "trackball." OK, it was still quite usable and the optical tracking was admittedly a lot nicer, plus it was less hefty and still a nifty slider phone, with better hardware specs than the Dream had.
Then hardware keyboards on phones were...just gone...and the "mouse" was eliminated entirely, as were physical buttons (in favor of nasty glitchy badly-behaved capacitive touch buttons.) That was where phones went to shit and never recovered. Never mind the app-ocalypse, where the free and open internet was gutted by the use of walled-garden apps, each with their own inconsistent behavior and each requiring its own ever-growing hefty pile of resources on your never-sufficient internal storage.
Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL? Because Facebook can't mine your damn contacts if they don't have an app, that's why.
Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs. Bring back phones that don't suck and stop shoving apps down our throats.
This story misses a huge point - what people are doing that 70% of the time on the "mobile internet." Just because hopelessly addicted phone addicts spend 12 hours a day on social media and netflix doesn't mean that this has somehow supplanted the "regular internet." Things that aren't a waste of time are generally done in front of a real screen on a real computer, which is why, even if it's just 30% of the time, the important stuff is still being done on a fully-functional website. Thus, websites designed for computer monitors won't be going away any time in the next 10 years.
Meh, a walled garden does not the internet make.
Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs.
They might want to sell a few phones. Nobody wants to buy phones with "5 row keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs".
Commercial viability matters. Catering to the 0.01% does not make for a viable market.
They're helping drive society towards nanosecond attention spans for one...
I only use the internet on my phone when on the road, and there's something I REALLY need
Tiny screens suck. Tiny keyboards suck
I much prefer my 30" monitor on my desk
The internet... just the internet.
All there ever was, or will be, is the internet.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I had the pleasure of owning the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) when it was a pretty new thing. The five-row keyboard, trackball, and extra hardware buttons basically meant that I had a tiny "laptop" in my pocket. I used it for VNC. I used it for SSH. I even ran a Debian overlay with X on it just because I could. It made the iPhones look stupid: one button, clunky touch-everything, dumbed down trash.
HTC Thunderbolt owner here, previously a connoisseur of the LG series, from the EnV on up to the Voyager. (Now I'm back to LG's G# and V20 ones.)
I'd love for a physical keyboard to return, but I also need a full-fledged and full-sized screen. Honestly, if something like the Sidewinder came back, I'd really seriously considering it. That's how much I love writing text.
The problem is that the market is limited, and with the learning spell check on most phones, the poor accuracy of fast touchscreen typing is often made up for with relatively little effort by the user all things considered.
For those that need frequent mobile access to a CLI, we have a better solution now that we didn't have then: Tablets. Set up your iPad with an integrated keyboard cover and you have something that will give you much more joy that anything you had before in a mobile factor for all but the most emergency-focused of sessions.
Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL? Because Facebook can't mine your damn contacts if they don't have an app, that's why.
Yes and no. NOW, mining data and having closer access to the device is important (especially for advertising-supported apps and social media networks). Once the early days of WAP/WML -> "tablet versions of websites" -> mobile-friendly site conversion was completed, though, the only real reason many apps were created was for the ability to push notifications to the user. Now that there's a web standard for that, a lot of those apps could indeed be turned back into straight web sites -- but that bridge has been crossed and it probably won't be crossed back until the pain and annoyance of updating apps outweighs unified web sites again.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Sampling the people I know IRL, about 1 in 3 of them have any kind of desktop, including laptop, computer. The rest are mobile-only. That trend accelerates all the time.
I know there's a lot of denial about that, just like the Unix Workstation people denied that Windows PCs were gonna take over and render them irrelevant. Same now. Non-mobile modalities are being rendered irrelevant.
In 5 years you'll log into your bank using biometrics captured on your phone. The concept of a "keyboard" is going away: most people can't even touch type any more.
I've seen this too, more and more people relying on mobile over an actual PC. Two reasons I see:
-Mobile is always on them so it's convenient
-Mobile has a more appliance like interface. Most people don't want to fart around managing their computer, they just want to be able to easily check the weather, check their mail, check their bank account balance, check social media.
A lot of "internet usage" is social media and messaging apps, which many very strongly target mobile devices, and people always have them on them so they get and respond to the notifications right away. This keeps feeding itself.
Back in the day "Home Computers" (C64, Apple //, TI-99/4A, etc) were very appliance like, while workstations, mini computers, mainframes, etc were used for complex jobs. With the move to PCs (MS and Mac) for home use, there was a lot more managing complexity that most users really don't care about. The move to mobile is a return to the simpler interface. PCs will remain for workstation type use, at least for a while.
Nobody? A quick google search for "i miss slider phones" gets 39 Million results.
That's a lot of nobodies.
Remember why Blackberry held on for years: they had a physical keyboard. POS Blackberry phones with limited app options and zero privacy sold well for years because people that do actual work are far more productive writing emails with a physical keyboard than tapping on glass.
The way I keep my cell plan cheap is to have the cheapest data plan. I save my internet browsing for the computer at home.
You suckers just keep going on thinking that everything you can see on a phone is the Internet. You can keep port 80. There are 65534 others I can use.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hey you kids .... get off of my lawn!!! Every older generation thinks the younger generation is terrible. In reality the only generation that really applied to were the baby boomers and they are back at it again with Trump. God willing, Trump will be the last boomer President.
Why can't I have Gnome2/Mate/fvwm95 on my phone?
Imprecision of a finger as a pointing device, and general lack of demand among users for stylus-driven interfaces.
Hierarchical Drop down menus are a great idea. Stupid, unrecognisable Icons - not so good.
The menu philosophy of things like MATE and Xfce assumes that users can hit long, skinny targets. This is true of a mouse, where hit ease is related to area (w * h). It is not true of a finger, where hit ease is related to the shorter of the two dimensions (min(w, h)).
5-row keyboards and trackballs sound a bit too large to my tastes. My N900 only has three rows and a touchscreen, and it's about half the size of the smallest touchslabs. I wouldn't mind something a little larger though, should a modern slide phone somehow become available.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If you cannot wait until you get to a computer terminal to access information then perhaps you should reconsider your priorities in life.
Someone with two jobs, one a day job in the office and the other working from home, may want to carry a laptop in order to work on the home job while riding public transit to and from the office.
For those that need frequent mobile access to a CLI, we have a better solution now that we didn't have then: Tablets. Set up your iPad with an integrated keyboard cover
...and it won't work while you're riding public transit. The App Store Review Guidelines prohibit running many development tools directly on the iPad. A workaround is to use the iPad to connect to an app server elsewhere on the Internet, such as in your home, through SSH, X11, VNC, or RDP. But the recurring fees for cellular Internet access on the iPad and for a dedicated IP on your app server make that workaround expensive. For this use case, a full-fledged compact laptop still beats an iPad.
Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL?
Because a vocal minority of users don't want to run script in the browser, but they are willing to install native apps outside the browser to access the same resources. Many users of sites like Slashdot and SoylentNews consider a native app somehow better for two reasons. First, they're platform-specific, as opposed to necessarily having to go through a least-common-denominator cross-platform compatibility layer. Second, a user can theoretically download the source code of any app on F-Droid and (hire someone to) review it.
If the "Internet" is all resources that can be accessed through an Internet connection, the "mobile Internet" is the subset of these resources for which access on a smartphone is bearable.
The HTC Dream was smaller than most of the larger 5"-class Android phones, though it was also a bit thicker. It was a slider phone so unless you were actively using the keyboard it still had the same general size as today's average Android phone. If it were remade today with an optical trackball and the more compact hardware available today, it could be significantly smaller overall.
The big deal with the 5-row keyboard is that it has function and number keys as well as a staggered key layout just like a normal keyboard. It's significantly easier to type quickly on than keyboards with less rows. It's even faster than predictive touch keyboards when you get used to using it.
All of the "better options" that have keyboards are also way too big to carry everywhere you go.
You could buy a foldable keyboard by Geyes that fits in your pocket, as recommended by DrYak. But that doesn't solve the by-design OS limits.
Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs. Bring back phones that don't suck and stop shoving apps down our throats.
I have a BB Passport. The keyboard doubles as a touchpad so you can scroll with it.
Works for me because the few android apps I want to run work fine on the BB (Actually, Words with Friends runs better on the Passport than on Android because in-app advertisements do not get downloaded).
Better display than an iPhone too, which is a nice bonus.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
In 5 years you'll log into your bank using biometrics captured on your phone.
You can sign in with a fingerprint on most phones now.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Because different media types have different costs and availability for bandwidth. This has always been true.
The bigger question is...what kind of an idiot thinks the mobile internet is AT ALL somehow distinct from the internet? They are and always have been the same fucking thing. Anybody who disagrees, please tell us all at what time it was impossible to route an internet protocol (IP) packet from a mobile device to a non-mobile web server? And before answering, know that the days before mobile phones could send IP packets, they by definition had no internet at all.
So the only way to acquire music or other material to listen to for entertainment is through streaming services and digital purchases? Riiiiiight. Countless hours of music on physical media all around the world, so abundant people build libraries of the stuff
I'm referring to the cost of "build[ing] libraries of the stuff." Since iTunes and Amazon MP3 became popular, how many people are willing to buy a $12.99 album for the one or two good songs on it?
God forbid someone takes it to the next level and decides to compose music intended to be listened and distribuited for free!
Say I were to go this route. What steps should I take to ensure that I'm not infringing someone's copyright by inadvertently making the melody of my piece of music too similar to that of a piece of music whose copyright someone else owns? See for example Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
it doesn't even need to be digital or computerized.
high capacity portable audio players that work completely offline - CD, flash memory and hard drive based.
Compact Disc Digital Audio is digital. So are SSD and HDD audio players.