This and also I don't want a tumor on the back of my phone. Can we go back to flat bodies at the expense of camera quality? For some of us phone cameras are really not _that_ important.
Their point is about battery life, and that a thicker phone is the compromise they're willing to make. They don't want a thicker phone just for the heck of it.
I think they are talking about a battery phone case somewhat like the Alpatronix Battery Case (if you want to look around - I just found one at random.)
That's probably going to provide a lot less battery than just increasing the phone thickness, wouldn't it? There's a lot of redundant layers of encapsulation in that approach.
I actually understand his comment to be primarily about wanting a thicker phone such that there is no camera bump. The possibility of a bigger battery is then a secondary benefit.
Either way, my point is that with a case the pixel 9 is mostly flat, and has a battery life that I can't complain about. How big the battery is physically is unimportant to me. Logically it's big enough.
I think for most people, better cameras are one of the selling points of a premium phone. I even know pretty serious photographers (which at one point included myself) who don't generally travel with standalone cameras for most purposes any longer.
Probably. But, if I look at Apple's advertising, takes better photos and video seems to be a pretty big part of what they're selling. (OK, AI on the new models.)
As long as apps are kept up to date, I'm not sure that OS-level security updates make much of a difference. Most breaches happen due to malicious apps. I haven't heard of any cases where somebody cracked the OS security and accessed user data.
Most of the world is not using the latest version of Android, and you don't really hear about viruses/malware like we used to with Windows machines in the '90s and '00s.
There are security bugs which allow hacking older Android phones invisibly, via sms or mms. I'm not entirely sure what Android version you need to avoid such problems; probably north of 8.
You can't. It will loose OS support in seconds! Then next update of your essential app will stop working as it needs the newer OS. Also the battery is fused to the screen or what and cannot keep up with the AI assisted emojis needs coming in with a random software update.
Nope. Strong no from me - camera is the reason I upgrade (beyond dead battery).
I agree the lens bulges are a pain in the arse, but I want a good camera.
You can buy low-end phones with minimal bump from the likes of Motorola and Nokia if cameras are not important to you. But I want my higher-end (not necessarily premium, but in that direction) phones to keep coming with better and better cameras please, and if that means a bit of a bulge then fine.
Most women I know buy the higher end phones for its cameras simply to take better selfies of themselves, they dont game (not stereotype, just stats in my region), they just use their phone for watching videos, listening to music, phone calling and most importantly take a gazillion photos each week.
So nearly 50% of the demographic is buying those phones simply for the camera, and a big screen, nothing else.
I’ve noticed its typically just men (including me), who dont care about the camera much at all, and just want a normie phone that can run most apps.
With USB-C, surely we are at the point where we can plug our phones into a hub with a couple of monitors attached and get a proper desktop environment?
I can't remember what the project was called, but many years ago I remember seeing a concept for a Linux phone that also doubled as your desktop when plugged into a hub.
All Samsung Galaxy phones have a built in desktop OS called Dex. I remember plugging my monitor usb-c cable to charge my phone and being blown away when a desktop UI appeared on the monitor
DeX is very good, lot of fun to use with a lapdock. However, you need to check if the particular model of phone supports it. Usually it's the more expensive models, so Galaxy S, Galaxy Z Fold/Flip, Galaxy Tab S, and 1 single model of A series, the A90 5G.
Works on my S21U. I use it a lot because I have some weird thing where I'll get really tense typing on a touchscreen keyboard, so if I have to type long messages in android-only apps its going on the docking station.
I used to love Dex, but later they removed the support for macOS. It used to work elegantly and android to mac connection was so easy. Being able to take calls, see messages and also file transfer. :)
The sad reality is that market forces don’t want this to happen, since it would cannibalize sales of those other devices. It’s much better for manufacturers to make sure a phone can only do “phone stuff” and a PC can only do “PC stuff”, because then you need to buy both devices.
I think Google is well-positioned to do it. They have experience with ChromeOS already, and running Linux apps on Android should be at least somewhat plausibly deniable. Google doesn't sell laptops either, so they aren't especially worried about the cannibalization.
The HP Elite x3 running Windows Phone 10 had a dock that would let you plug in a monitor and peripherals to provide a desktop Windows environment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Elite_x3
If Intel hadn't cancelled their x86 smartphone chip (Broxton?), I wouldn't have been surprised to see an x86 Windows Phone with a desktop mode.
I'm unconvinced. Lots of people are increasingly fine with just phones. My dad I sort of see but I had a co-worker who told me their kid didn't even want a laptop for schoolwork which blew my mind a bit but so it goes.
Any hybrid would be a compromise for me. I do have multiple systems--almost certainly more than I need.
I don't see who is refusing to sell you a phone with various attachments that make a workable computer (especially given 3rd party providers). I just bought such with an iPad. You could do something along the same lines with an iPhone I suppose but I'd probably find it unsatisfactory. Still on the fence whether the iPad is still a fully satisfactory companion device for traveling in general.
In the Apple ecosystem, the one “refusing to sell you…” is Apple, and not only the required peripherals but also not making the software work that way. Because if they did, then you wouldn’t need to buy a Mac.
Macs are not especially relevant to Apple revenue at this point. iPad plus magnetic keyboard is getting pretty close. Still not sure that better multitasking would push me over the edge to not wanting a MacBook for serious day-to-day multitasking work.
I do think they're trending in that direction but I actually like that they're not pushing people faster than feels comfortable. I expect to see a convergence of iPads and at least MacBook Airs but we're not quite there yet.
They absolutely did. Back in the early 2000 everyone in my friend group would tell their parents that they needed a powerful PC for schoolwork and that's how they got gaming PCs.
I'm not sure how to interpret your comment. Do you think kids should be exposed to proper computers or do you think it doesn't matter and can always be picked up later.
I don't think this true. Microsoft really, really tried to make UWP a real thing so you could buy a Windows Phone and turn it into a PC by adding it to a docking station, and consumers were totally uninterested. I've never seen or heard of anybody using Samsung Dex in any real capacity apart from a party trick either. I think lack of phone-PC convergence is a bottom-up phenomenon, not a top-down one.
It would have helped if they waited that the market would grew beyond 10%, and didn't keep messing up the whole development experience, that even on Windows desktop made everyone besides Windows team lose interest.
Now they want to sell services, while Apple and Google control all major endpoints.
Single monitor is probably doable by the majority of phones on the market, but multi-monitor is another story. I’m not sure that most phone SoCs have the hardware to support more than one, which would mean that additional monitors would need to be driven via software ala DisplayLink which might make the phone get hot and negatively impact battery health.
The other issue is demand. I suspect that the number of people who’d like their phone to double as a computer is actually rather small — non-technophiles just do everything on their phone these days, and increasingly the main reason anybody keeps around a computer is for more “big iron” sorts of use cases that are too demanding for smartphones. The market for a converged computer-phone device is basically down to people whose needs would be served by a Chromebook, but would prefer an external monitor and keyboard which is rather niche.
I'd be somewhat interested. Single-monitor is good enough for most people for home computing stuff. And touch-screen interaction on a tiny screen sucks for anything like spreadsheets, composing documents, dealing with PDFs, or dense forms.
I would probably come down to separate devices however, in the interests of security and continuity. A phone is much more likely to be lost or stolen than a computer on a desk at home. I keep my really important stuff on my computer, and try to keep my phone as disposable as possible.
Another thing in favor of separate devices, is that for lightweight usecases that benefit from traditional desktop UX (like spreadsheets, as you mentioned) even cheap PCs have been extreme overkill for the better part of two decades at this point — the latest greatest desktop hardware is barely better than a mid-late Core 2 Duo booted off an SSD for productivity.
One could buy a cheap mini-PC and put some flavor of Linux on it and it’d serve office software duty for upwards of 10 years without issue. Even accounting for FOSS aftermarket Android distros, smartphone hardware doesn’t have that kind of longevity.
My ancient pixel 4a can use a hub for a keyboard and mouse, and a icro projector. It has a chrooted fedora running on it. This has all worked for pretty much as long as android has been a thing, though the display had ro wait on usb-c.
I mean I have a 10 year old MacBook laptop I use downstairs in the kitchen as a "desktop." It's just fine for most purposes. If I needed to pay $10K for such a device and replace it with my phone and a hub sure. But same thing with Xbox. Computers by themselves are mostly not that expensive or bulky.
Me, I already have a laptop. I'm used to working on a laptop. I'm used to having 2 screens in the desktop setup (one being the laptop's). I actively use that fact.
Using only one device would mean a downgrade in my work setup - one screen less. Moreover, if I'm traveling and have to work somewhere on the fly, a laptop offers a decent keyboard and tolerable screen size by itself. And there is a variety of options on offer (larger screens, lighter laptop, more computing power), so I can pick the optimal one for me.
As such, I don't see a smartphone replacing my daily driver, nor my "planned to work while travelling" driver. Best-case scenario it'd a below-average compromise. But the laptop market offers enough choice that I can get a better compromise for less there.
But we are, for ~6 years now? If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone - the most sold phone models in the world (trades place with Apple sometimes) with 60m+ devices/year sold, just plug it in and there you have it. Full peripherial support, you have a perfect multitasking desktop environment and access the same files - called DeX mode.
And yet, this question is here - somehow no one really uses it or even knows about it.
Samsung Dex does this pretty well, and has been for ages now. It's an undersold feature in my opinion. Samsung used to experiment with using Ubuntu for their desktop environment but they shut that down a while back (I forgot why, I guess it was too much of a pain to maintain).
Microsoft tried to do it with Windows Phone years ago, but phones were way too slow and Windows on ARM was an even worse prospect at the time, so that died too.
I own a Galaxy Tab (an s 8.4?) from 2018 with Dex on Linux (or was it Linux or Dex?) It's a docker container running an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop on the Android kernel. They developed it with Canonical to be able to use the hardware of the tablet to do graphics and probably more. Then Android moved on, Ubuntu moved on and probably they would have had to pay Canonical again to keep it up to date, plus dedicating their own engineers to the project. It was axed and removed from the next update from Samsung.
It worked well but of course Android would kill any Ubuntu process at random if RAM usage reached a certain threshold, so I wouldn't use it for anything heavy. I remember I was able to run a Ruby on Rails project of mine plus emacs. Slower than my laptop but still decent. The real problem was the limited amount of RAM of the tablet and the insecurity deriving from random process terminations.
With respect to hardware only, perhaps. But the OS is still locked down compared to a real desktop OS and the apps are simplified for touch interfaces, and designed for content consumption first and production second.
My old Samsung S20FE can plug into my office-issue Dell monitor and give me full Dex desktop (also using the second screen) and connect to the keyboard and mouse that stay wirelessly connected to the USB ports on the screens. IIRC it also made use of the headset plugged in via USB.
If I was a student with Chromebook-style needs (browser-based tools) it would be worth considering instead of a laptop.
Im surprised Apple hasn’t done this yet. I thought about this maybe 5-6 years ago as a product idea.
My thought was that you had a monitor with a wireless charging pad built into the base, drop you phone on the base and it automatically connects to the monitor and other peripherals and starts charging.
You just pick up your phone and leave and it automatically disconnects.
I think other commenters are right that this would cannibalize Apples own products, which is a shame since I think it would be awesome to have a unified computing device.
MacOS already runs on arm64 and the iphone has wireless charging and bluetooth, so I don’t think there is a lot stopping Apple from doing this.
It would not be hard for them to do this, and some apps exist to emulate a desktop environment when you plug the iPhone into a dock and hook it up to a monitor, but it's pretty sad that Apple won't embrace something like this.
Despite the fact that the largest iPhone and smallest iPad are less than 2" difference, the $130 Apple Pencil will not work with an iPhone Pro Max, and both devices run different operating systems with arbitrary features.
One of the biggest complaints about their latest iPad was that it's so powerful yet limited by iPadOS. I feel the same way about my iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Apple wants you to have an iMac as your desktop, a MacBook for your mobile device, an iPad to watch videos, and an iPhone to bring with you.
Contra Microsoft which tried to use Windows as a beachhead to everything, Apple has actually been pretty successful. I do expect to see more convergence over time. But, even if there are self-interested reasons for not sprinting in that direction, I also think there are good reasons for keeping use cases (e.g. phone/consumer/creator) a bit separated in the near-term rather than forcing everyone in one bucket.
I was in a Microsoft event 15-20 years ago. They showed a fantasy video of a construction foreman leaving his house with his phone, casting its contents to different devices (his TV, stereo, car) on the go etc.
I still can't do that with any Microsoft system. I've been able to do it with Apple devices for a good 5-10 years.
That's what I was able to do with my Librem 5 in the last few years, so yes. Well, almost - there are two display controllers in that SoC and one of them is limited to the internal screen, so you can't connect "a couple of monitors", just one (4K60Hz).
If, like me, you remembered that Microsoft tried this for a bit with Windows Phone but couldn't remember the name to look it up, it was called Continuum.
> When was the last time you felt your smartphone really couldn’t cope?
Every day since a couple years now.
> I struggle to recall the last time an app jerked and juddered into life.
I don’t. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t that way at first. It’s just that over time my phone just slowed down. Purging it of its data and unused software did nothing, I just had less and less available memory over time, and maps grew slower and slower, and it was becoming increasingly impossible to open several, sometimes just two applications at the same time.
---
That being said, I do agree with the core point of the article: phones are plenty fast enough.
Heck, I’m pretty sure a snappy modern UI with all the bells and whistles except perhaps a voice assistant requires less than a tenth of the computing power of the average phone. We just need reasonably performing software. Not crazy optimised software, just something that makes decent use of the CPU and GPU, and doesn’t consume too much RAM.
But the market won’t even give us that. You know what, keep that up a few years and I’ll seriously think of switching back to a flip phone.
Yes, but that's battery degradation. Cheap Android phones are inadequate out of the box.
Also, despite Android fanboys getting triggered, I never said that there are no good Android phones. There are. And the median Android phone is more powerful than an iPhone for the money (especially non-US models). The differentiator is that Apple doesn't ship iPhones that are too awful.
Not my experience at all. I have a 2016 Galaxy S7 in a drawer that would still be fine as a daily driver were it not for the worn-down battery. I have a separate phone from 2020 that I was using as a TikTok device (quite resource-heavy app) and it runs fine even now.
Why don’t you replace the battery? Third party batteries are usually quite affordable and good enough! Even yesterday I’ve replaced a worned out battery on a very old iPhone 5S (2013) for my son to watch things on youtube kids..
Because iPhones are not layers of glass glued together from either end, with a battery sandwiched in-between. Apple gets a lot of shit (deservedly or not), but they have taken pains to make refreshing their phones (battery, screen, etc) a not-garbage experience
If you want to replace a battery on a relatively modern Samsung flagship, you will likely swear, drink, and/or curse the engineers that decided "Glass and glue is good enough"
Then the malware is hiding in the system space, which for some reason takes over 70% of all my available memory.
I’ve heard that as systems update, they keep the old stuff around until you run out of memory. I haven’t checked, and I have yet to reset my phone to factory setting, but if that’s what’s really happening, that’s still unacceptable.
One reason for low memory being responsible for slow loading times, is on the fly (de)compression, to save what little memory the phone has left.
Don't bother. Flip phones have enshittified, too. (Alarms don't consistently trigger unless you disable and re-enable them after setting them; sometimes the sound just breaks until the phone's restarted; if any voicemail expires then the phone's voicemail indicator is stuck there forever; J2ME support has been removed, so the only available games are the ones you have to text a premium number to "buy" (even though the software comes pre-installed).)
Multiple different brands have the same buggy OS, even those which used to be household names. This must've saved the companies at least $20 000.
The reason for throttling after battery health dips below a certain point is to prevent the SoC from creating spikes in power demand that the battery is unable to service (which becomes progressively more likely as the battery degrades) so the phone doesn’t crash at inopportune times.
Back in the mid-2010s when I was broke and getting by on a worn out hand-me-down iPhone I would’ve loved to have that feature. It really sucks when your phone dies in the middle of a business call at 40% battery thanks to one of those aforementioned spikes.
Any idea why it only happens to iPhones? I don't think I've noticed this on Androids, where the only impact of longevity is the lack of updates from the manufacturers and then Google Play Services starts to fill up the storage with updates.
This happened to one of my previous Xiamoi Phones too. Apparently the Flash Storage degrades over time, which makes everything that uses I/O super slow. For instance, starting Firefox took almost a minute, but it was usable as soon as all needed data was available in RAM. This is a known issue in the respective community, and sadly kills devices that would still be usable with the latest Android thanks to Custom Roms.
Unless that better performance was at the cost of overclocking older designs, making it run hotter and less efficient. I think Intel got into this groove with a lot of their models for a few years doing this. I get what you're saying, and if its clocked lower than its designed for, power savings are incredible (I've gotten 10 hours on an older laptop that did this from the factory)
Self driving cars are more automobile than automobiles and AI imagery is more CGI than CGI. It's not really ironic, we name things in relation to what came before them, but then often keep working in the same direction.
More personal in terms of use case, sure. And it performs computations - but it's pretty clear most mobile devices are not really your computer, when push comes to shove.
So, it's hard to call it a PC at the end of the day IMO.
I disagree. Smart phones are too locked down to be personal computers. Sure they do "computing things" but you're only allowed to do what they want you to do. They're so limited, I can hardly even repurpose and old phone to do simple things.
What does this mean? With a personal computer I can do anything I want, for my own benefit. With an iPhone I can do what Apple gives me permission to do, subject to what benefits them.
I'm not sure I know what that means. Yes, I use my iPhone as a camera but I download pics just as with a dedicated camera on a regular basis. I did break one a year or so back but, given reasonable backup practices, it was no different than breaking a PC or it failing.
It's interesting you say "just" a tool - I think the median reader here sees tool as an inherent part of what "computer" means.
I'm not trying to dismiss your perspective here, I think you have a real point about the intimacy and personal importance of modern smartphone usage. From a layperson perspective, you're absolutely correct that these deliver on the promise of "personal computer."
But to those who choose to spend more time learning and understanding them, computers are (very flexible) tools, and specifically they're tools where you get to choose the computation being performed. This is why, to me at least, (most) mobile devices simply can't be "personal computers."
Smartphones and tablets are still useful to people with that perspective - but I see them not as a computer but as an appliance. I turn it on, I turn it off, I maybe get to fiddle with a few knobs, but most of it is a black box that hopefully "just works."
And hey, I like that convenience - as long as it's not the only way I have to interact with technology.
So, it may seem pedantic, but I think it is worth distinguishing true general purpose computers from phones. They are absolutely personal - a "personal smart appliance", if you will, but not a personal computer at the end of the day.
This was precisely the target of the Motorola Atrix. They sold a netbook-like "shell" with a monitor and keyboard, and when you plugged the Atrix smartphone in it became an Ubuntu webtop device.
Which is precisely why I would expect it to be the start of such a discussion. The "use your smartphone as your PC" thing has been attempted again and again for, as you said, 13 years. Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want.
That seems hugely important to such a conversation.
Modularity was probably a big deal once upon a time because of hardware costs and the difficulty of synchronization. I'm just not sure it's been that that for a long time. Even the iPad which I somewhat hesitantly bought with a keyboard (and pencil) for a versatile travel device, I'm not totally convinced I couldn't have stuck with mu old MacBook Pro for most purposes.
There's so many reasons why it's hard to say this is really unwanted. Atrix was a boutique not mainstream product so who knows what would have happened had it been generally usable.
At the time we didn't have anything like usb-c, so it was all special peripherals and displays. Now though a decent % of displays do have USB-c with power, and that's totally different starting conditions. Especially if that display also has a keyboard and mouse plugged in, which many do!
Commercial success requires paving of cow paths, needs a low impedance route to mass success. We haven't been in a spot where that's ever been remotely possible before.
Do I think Android on display is going to totally take over & dominate soon? No, no I don't. But mass availability and a world capable of supporting - making use of this capability has just arrived, and this really lets us get started with these ubiquitous & pervasive computing ideas that, so far/until now, have had to be bespoke offering.
Different but also similar, it feels like game streaming has some reasonable popularity too now, and it's another case of using interconnect across devices & peripherals that I think a lot of people have really grown into & deeply enjoy being able to do. It's still a small segment of people, relatively, but to me it speaks of adoption curves & how success is often extremely slow, how there are real fans who feel great joy & happiness, without the rest of the world being much tuned in or aware.
> Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want.
What the people definitely didn't want was the performance of 2011 smartphone for desktop. The use case didn't fail, that device failed because the limits at the time made the phone desktop impractical. And I remember it not being a stellar smartphone either.
But every smartphone also failed until they didn't fail anymore because they were good enough. Phones today have astounding levels of performance so they can easily serve as desktops.
Starting the discussion from impractical attempts made "ages" ago (in tech terms) is a nice bit of historical trivia but not an indictment of the "phone desktop" idea. It's like starting every discussion about EVs with how early 20th century EVs failed because people don't want EVs.
I don't think performance is the only problem. The software is at least as much of an issue.
What kind of software environment do you expect when you connect your mouse, keyboard and 22" screen to a device where everything is geared toward touch input on a 6" screen?
It's not an unsolvable problem and I do think there is demand for it if done right. But it's not a solved problem either.
The iPad is a perfectly usable machine with keyboard and mouse, and it's quite popular so that's a good general model to aim for. Even running some remote desktop (thin client mode) could be a great feature and productivity boost.
> it's not a solved problem either
Never said it is. But we can't use one experience from the baby years of the smartphone to proclaim what won't work or won't have demand today. If we never try to solve a problem, especially because "it didn't work on the first attempt ages ago", then we'll never solve a problem.
I agree that phone manufacturers should focus on features more than performance as it's been more than fine for some time now. I use an iPhone 14 Pro and it's still more than fast enough for everything I do with it.
As for convergence I'm not so sure. The only place I use a desk is at work and even if a phone could optimally run a docker stack and everything else I need there wouldn't really be a benefit to me. I guess taking a phone home instead of the work MBP would be a bit easier but meh, I carry a bag anyway and then I would need something to plug it into at home.
For personal I use my MBP on the couch. If it was a laptop-like dock that my phone slipped into, ok, that would work but A) Apple will never do that and B) what would the benefit be? I doubt it would be a ton cheaper and I'd need to keep my phone more up to date than I do now because I do want a powerful laptop.
In principle I like the idea, but in practice I don't think it would work for me. What I'd be more interested in is running macOS on an iPad.
I have thought since I got a 13" mobile usb-c screen to not take a laptop with me, but the problem is that ios ux is not designed for this. It is a petty because the hardware definitely supports it.
I would be happy enough if termux gained access to more sdk functions. I have been running jupiter notebooks and until some previous Android version one could run code against views of the system folders.
It has been years already for me, I don't buy any Android phone that goes over the 300 euro barrier, and use them until they are no longer fit for purpose, meaning they die, or get stolen.
Updates are anyway a joke, so I stop caring for that to the point I only have a passing interest on what Android team shows off at Google I/O.
Apple stuff I only use via my employer/customers, but same reasoning applies regarding features I care about.
Happy user of a Galaxy S7 from 2016. It's smaller than what you can get now and has a physical apps/home/back area which I love. I use them till I break or lose them. I never have to care about because I know I can get a second had one for less than 100 euros. Not having valuable stuff with is really liberating. Will use them until I can't no more.
Who regularly gets phones lost or stolen? I did break one once hiking with some sort of rock collision in my pocket but this isn't a regular thing over many years.
I do. One was lost watching a video in the bathtub. A wasp came very closed to my head and I dived into the water with phone in hand sadly. Another one fell off my bike phone holder while riding on old style pavement (lots of vibrations) and the car behind me rolled over it (still functional except for the screen though, I was impressed). Another was lost because I left it in a stupid place that I did not have access to later. All of this during the course of six years which means each phone last an average of 2 years. Not too bad in my opinion.
It actually makes sense though. If they can get a usable phone for about $100, then they can break at least 10 of them before they are even close to the cost of a single iphone. With that kind of reasoning you can afford to do much more risky and fun stuff with your phone.
When I was a teen, Symbian smartphones with a physical slide keyboards were all the rage, but too expensive for my budget. I was day dreaming of how cool that'd be to be able to ssh someplace from a phone via grps. I did it years later once (from an early android phone). Now I have an android phone that can do that easily (albeit without a physical keyboard), and yet I never do that day to day. Phones make poor computer and computer make poor phones - it appears easier to send data across then to bother trying to merge them into one.
The real question I have is why software keeps getting progressively slower requiring faster phones. I don't buy the "devs are lazy / management pushes for frequent releases, so devs use poor expensive platforms like electron" or "all manufactures conspire to make phones that age too fast" - both devs and companies have always been like that, I don't see any recent fundamental shift in that. And it is not like current dev experience is somehow fundamentally different and easier then 10y ago - we use similar kinds of abstraction to do similar things (maybe ~20% more productive and simple?). I am genuinely confused.
I can't tell my new Pixel 9 Pro being any faster and I think the effective screen resolution is LESS than my Pixel 6a is, out of the box. I liked the way it fit in my hand better, too. 3 years felt like long enough to "deserve" an upgrade but I kind of regret even bothering to upgrade. The camera is better but that's about it.
While I agree that phones make poor computers, smartphone + Bluetooth keyboard + "found" external display (e.g., hotel room TV) + remote connection to a desktop PC is an excellent alternative to vacationing with a laptop "just in case".
Looks like it... exists. And not much more. I doubt it's a high priority for PMOS devs given that lot of internal hardware is still only partially working or not at all.
I really wish there was some startup that made a relatively affordable Linux phone that is competitive with modern phones in performance, stability, and support.
Yes, and it's not limited to TUI applications. My Pinephone Pro runs Plasma Mobile, and if I plug it into a dock with mouse+keyboard+monitor plugged in, it switches into desktop mode with floating windows and everything.
This keeps being postponed. For some reason Chrome OS isn’t being ported to Android devices. Motorola tried their take. Microsoft tried the windows phone thingy. Nokia had the N900 Linux phones. Even Android was supposed to run a Windows 11 VM just fine. Microsoft killed the Surface Neo. There was a phone shaped Windows PC called the Emporium or something, killed too.
This whole space has been cursed. You can hack some old Nokias or Androids to run windows on arm and have driver issues. You can use a handheld pc console like the GPD Win and get the LTE addon. But there’s no “this phone is a PC“ offering that is really viable.
I suppose having a Pinephone and running Linux is the best option right now.
I used a lap dock for a while (UPERFECT) which allowed me to plug a device via usb c and it would turn the phone into a basic laptop.
> For some reason Chrome OS isn’t being ported to Android devices.
ChromeOS is actively being re-implemented to run on top of the Android kernel.
Reasons for this may range from merely wanting to minimize kernel/driver work, to something more strategic, and nobody high enough up that chain to know seems to be willing to risk their NDA.
I've used it plenty. In fact it's what I used primarily on the lap dock. However, I think it's pretty poor. Android apps really don't feel natural in windows. The window management is generally poor. I like pinning windows to half of the screen, using keyboard shortcuts. Having a consistent clipboard across apps. I think it's an ok solution, but everything runs a bit slow and feels stilted. It doesn't help that wireless solutions have pretty severe refresh rate and lag issues, and usb c makes the setup a bit inelegant. It came in handy a few times that I wanted to do text input and my phone wouldn't be ideal. That's it.
I find it highly annoying that these rather powerful handheld smartphone computers don't have decent port access for use with instrumentation, etc.
A huge range of features comes to mind from Geiger counters, oscilloscopes, sound level measurement, light intensity, etc , etc. The potential to expand the smartphone capability is enormous yet no manufacturer has tackled it. Why not?
Why aren't there multiple USB ports? By now why don't all phones use USB-3? Why isn't there general purpose D/A and A/D ports/outputs for instrumentation? Why don't they include a GPIB-like bus to connect to things? Why can't we use the screen as an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of say 100MHz?
Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).
I find it amazing that no smartphone manufacturer has
branched out into this field. Such potential and no one is servicing it. Phone manufacturers are missing out by not servicing this scientific/techie measurement market.
Why, say, doesn't Fairphone provide a range of interchangeable ports/modules that can changed for different functions, to add additional sensors, etc.?
> Why aren't there multiple USB ports? By now why don't all phones use USB-3? Why isn't there general purpose D/A and A/D ports/outputs for instrumentation? Why don't they include a GPIB-like bus to connect to things? Why can't we use the screen as an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of say 100MHz?
Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0. There do exist phones with multiple USB ports, and there do exist plenty of USB3 capable phones. Instrumentation and measurement is an extremely specialized field, and the number of people that would maybe find use out of it would quickly switch to a more useful interface for something like an oscilloscope.
For your general purpose adc and dac, they already make one: it’s called a usb-c audio adapter.
"Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0."
How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement.
Moreover, this article alone has raised the matter of additional features.
Anyway, it's only a matter of time until some (likely small) manufacturer breaks the boring mold and steps out. That's inevitable because the market is already saturated with phones that all have exactly the same features.
> For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement.
I said approximately 0, when compared to smartphone sales… which it is. I don’t need a survey to know that, since the vast vast vast majority of people using phones don’t even know what an oscilloscope, a DAC, or an ADC is. If you think that’s untrue, I’d suggest widening your horizons a bit.
Also, I’d think that you don’t work in test and measurement. I use test equipment in my day job and I wouldn’t trust the output of a phone if I’m doing actual production work. You need calibrated equipment for that. Maybe okay for debugging, but there’s tons of cheap measurement equipment that works just fine for general purpose debugging and has a much better UI than anything you’d get on a touch screen.
To expand upon that point: a new feature for smartphones that really takes off has to fall in one of two categories:
1. so incredibly convenient to always have with you, that everyone's willing to overlook shortcomings compared to dedicated equipment. Prime example: camera.
2. Offer a new type of use that is widely considered desirable. Example: mobile access to Internet.
Most use cases either cater to too few people and/or fall into the category "those who'd really care, already have dedicated equipment which is better". With flagship phones costing more and more, that equipment is probably also cheaper - or, at least, is price tag is not that outlandish.
Even replacing laptops probably won't catch on, simply because companies can easily provide a good laptop for half the price of a flagship phone (if not less). So they're not going to facilitate that. And if the boss isn't on board, would you want to use your own private phone as your primary work laptop?
The GP seems to be basically saying the same thing as many others have expressed. They want their phone to basically be a PC. Whether that involves upgrading, installing your own OS, or otherwise just being able to use it for an arbitrary workload.
I don't know why the market is such, that expensive phones remove features, such as extra sim card slots, sd card slots or head phone jacks. It doesn't seem impossible that Samsung could find room in their lineup of 8000 phones to have a ruggedised phone, with some kind of standardised interface on the back.
especially, as increasingly you go to a restaurant and the waiter has a phone/ tablet. and I'm sure there are many other industries that could do with basically a phone, that does one extra specialised thing, be that an rfid scanner, or a bore scope, or a label printer.
Why have these features built in if you can have a usb back case/device with them?
There are many back cases for specialised functionality like PoS, Ir camera etc.
Also, with many cases you can have devices connecting wirelessly via bluetooth - e.g. I bought a bluetooth trichiscope recently.
Making a specialised phone instead of a plugin is a way more expensive option. And in risky if the market is so small that nobody did a plugin first.
There were I think two companies that tried to build a modular phone where you could eg replace camera
with a module of your own design - the issue was that they were bulkier and more expensive than a regular design - you can’t cheat physics.
Also, how much more would you be willing to pay for such a phone? Could you pay 2-3x the price and be happy with upgrades every 3-5 years, and the phone having electronics that are 1-3 years behind the top of the line ones on the start? Because that’s the reality of production with niche products.
> Even replacing laptops probably won't catch on, simply because companies can easily provide a good laptop for half the price of a flagship phone
You’re comparing top of the range phones to low end laptops. A low to mid range phone can be bought from a reputable manufacturer (Samsung) for about £200 and it has plenty of processing to do email, video calls, PowerPoint, and basic spreadsheets. My wife works for the government and I’m pretty sure one of those phones would be about as responsive as the hunk of junk they provide her with, and for half the price.
Phones are also often paid for too. If you had a keyboard + screen + battery and could just clip your phone in that would feel like a pretty nice setup.
Bonus there is that it's one place for all your data.
Alternatively, on the data side I've been shocked at how cheap storage is now. I bought a 256gb usb stick shipped for £10. I've got tiny 4tb external drives. You can get terabyte microsd cards! It'd be pretty nice to have a setup where the device is intended to be blank and you just pop your data card in. I know it's more complex but not that complex for what would to me feel like a fairly sci-fi thing.
You're right about phones also being provided.
With that in mind, I'd say: if your company and other places of business you tend to visit all go for this concept, I think it could work. But as long as the boss expects you to work on a laptop, this'll remain a niche application.
Honestly, I'd love to be surprised and see everyone switching to docking setups everywhere. But I just think the positives over current working modes are too small to gain the needed traction. And that's before considering downsides other than investment costs/overcoming network effects.
"Also, I’d think that you don’t work in test and measurement"
I've worked in one of the prototype laboratories of one of the biggest electronics companies in the world where we actually developed communication equipment.
Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea is preposterous.
Given your comment, one has to ask what you do and at what level.
Conflating ideas and 'reading' stuff that isn't actually there is the single biggest problem with the internet.
.
> Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea is preposterous.
>> Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).
Your words, not mine. Without more context (which you didn't provide) it's unreasonable to expect me to understand what you mean (you, in fact, advocate I don't 'read stuff' that isn't actually there) outside of replacing actual test and measurement equipment.
The point you are making is irrelevant as it has nothing to do with my point which is what I want as features on my phone. Whether manufacturers make them or how many other people may want the same as I do is a separate issue.
What phone do you use now and are you satisfied with it?
Tell me that and I may be able to then figure where you are coming from. BTW, read my comment to f6v.
> How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
I responded with:
> just look outside in the real world?
That’s totally relevant to you asking why no mass-market phones support increasingly niche features that ~0% of the population need or want, and you expanding on this by saying “me and one other person I know want this”…
The point I put forward is what I and a small select section of the market wants as features—NOT what's on offer from manufacturers now.
The argument people are putting here is that manufacturers would not serve that market. These are two separate issues. Isn't that clear?
When someone makes what I want then I'll buy it. BTW, I've not suggested anything that cannot be made now with existing technology.
Instead, manufacturers are removing important features such as not including FM radio and 3.5mm headphone sockets. These are the first two specs I look for on a phone before I buy it. If they're not included I'm not interested. Full stop!
In brief, the lowest common denominator is NOT what I want. The market has to be more diverse. That in part is what the article is about and why I commented.
The tiny minority of people who want this do not form a market large enough to bear the amortized engineering and manufacturing cost of adding those niche features.
Imagine somebody asking for phones that have a built-in Swiss army knife because there is a (tiny) segment of the market who would benefit from it.
Before it makes sense to integrate these features to the phone, you would expect to see a thriving ecosystem of third-party external dongles providing the same, for example.
The market is not more diverse because there is no money to be made by making it more diverse. You underestimate the cost just as much as you overestimate the size of the market segment that wants those features.
"The tiny minority of people who want this do not form a market large enough to bear the amortized engineering and manufacturing cost of adding those niche features"
I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now!
All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.
If Fairphone were to provide a slot I'm damn sure there'd be call to use it. Think Raspberry Pi and all its ports, just transfer the concept to a phone that's almost suitable now.
> I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now!
Fairphones devices are, frankly, bad value and not particularly interesting. Being able to “upgrade” components is not very useful, if those components are already years behind. Also, fairphone doesn’t allow this! You just can replace components with the same kind… which just makes repairing easier.
> All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.
You have one. It’s called the USB-C port. Make whatever you want with it, it’s widely supported and compatible.
Also, there is a small market for people who don't want a laptop. Or a Raspberry Pi. I bet a Pi with display would make a better if slightly larger.
It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub. It used to be they were all USB-C to USB-A but there are starting to USB-C only hubs.
"It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub"
First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated.
Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.
Frankly, is this is a first-class fucking nuisance. Why can't I have direct compatibility with my PCs and laptops?
To get my phones to do what I want I have to root them and even this isn't fully satisfactory. Rooting is a pain and takes a lot of time to do it correctly and I'd prefer not to do it
With OTC there is no consistency across phone manufacturers. Why the hell not?
Also, why are phone manufacturers removing micro SD slots from phones?
More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?
Now if I go to that despised Chinese company Huawei I can get NTFS support by default (on OTG at least). That Huawei can offer NTFS as a standard feature and most others do not tells me a lot about the oligopoly-like smartphone market.
People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.
There's been fuck-all worthwhile innovation in recent years.
> First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated.
First, multiple USB ports are bulky, and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about. I don't need an extra port for the majority of my uses.
> Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.
The timeouts are for idle time. If you have a long period of idle time, you aren't using the device... which consumes power from your tiny phone battery. It's very reasonable for the uses most people use them for. I'd agree it would be nice to have the ability to disable the timeout, but I can't speak to what every phone manufacturer is doing.
> More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?
What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways.
> People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.
And what exactly is wrong with that? Laptops also haven't had "innovation" in the sense you're describing in years either. They serve their purpose, do what they do well, and get marginally better year over year. It's fine.
"What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways."
One of the reasons why my reply is late is because of exFAT problems. Right, I don't expect you to believe that but it's true—see my comment at the end.
exFAT may have better compatibility but it's about the worst file system ever invented. Have you ever thought why Microsoft made it freely available and not NTFS? Yes, everyone believes the MS mantra that exFAT uses fewer resources than NTFS and that's true but it seems few are aware about how diabolical this file system actually is and the high potential it has for losing one's data.
Why? Well it has only one FAT table and not two, clobber that and one is stuffed big-time—and often many people lose data this way.
Why would Microsoft eliminate the second backup FAT table in exFAT when it was proven so valuable in earlier versions of FAT—especially given exFAT's higher capacity where the loss of data would be even more disastrous? (Even Blind Freddy ought to be able to see the necessity of having a second FAT to protect one's data.)
Let me give you an example: about 12 months ago I was transferring some data stored on my smartphone's 512GB microSD card to my PC when I lost about 231GB of data! That's no small loss and I've still not recovered it.
You may well ask how that happened. Simple, the SD was removed from the phone and placed in the PC's USB slot to move a small percentage of files to the PC. Unfortunately, I removed the SD before the write process had completed and it clobbered the FAT and everything was deleted, the card was not only devoid of all files but also according to Windows it was now unformatted.
OK, so it was my fault, that I accept—doubly so because I didn't follow the golden rule of copying everything first before deleting the source files (although in this case that wouldn't have saved the files that I'd not moved).
I tried the usual unearase utilities/procedures and only recovered shrapnel. Of course, what else would one expect when file systems don't store files in contiguous sectors. This is yet another antiquated idea where data integrity is traded for speed without adequate fallback/safety protections.
You probably are asking why I removed the SD from the phone instead of transferring the data by OTG. That's easily explained too, OTG on phones is inordinately slow except for the very few that use USB3—not to mention the fact that Android (especially so since v10) won't allow one to copy data from say the Android directory. (In this instance, even though I wasn't copying all the files there were enough to make removing the SD to provide a worthwhile saving in time (it had over 300k files stored on it).)
Fortunately, most of the files were already backed up so only a small incremental amount of nonessential data was lost and I've put the SD aside until I get around to mirroring it in case I ever want to recover them. Incidentally, this isn't the only time I've killed an exFAT's table but it's the only time I've lost data (other times the data was already backed up). I'm not alone I could tell stories of others who I know personally who've lost data in similar circumstances.
I've experimented with exFAT both on SD cards and SSDs and have come to the conclusion that if one wants to kill all data on such a dive quickly without secure delete so it looks like a new drive then all one has to do is to disconnect it during a write operation. It's that catastrophic.
Now comparing exFAT with NTFS is like chalk and cheese. If I'd been using NTFS then none of that would have happened. NTFS is a proper journaling file system with good inbuilt protections, it's hardy and will take much abuse before significant data is lost. Moreover, the argument that NTFS uses large resources and overhead is now mute—we're long past the days...
There's fantastically few phones with multiple USB ports. Some of the Lenovo Legion gaming handhelds are the only ones I can think of.
But we are seeing some signs this might change. And insure hope it does, in a big way. A hub can be ok, but with the need to mix display out & peripherals and power, in fancy ways, USB3 really is a limited option. And alas USB4 fixes many of the constraints but is way too high end alas alas alas. Anyways here's an upcoming very cheap tablet with multiple ports, and reports are a lot more are coming. Given the marginal cost of ports, it's about frelling time! Do it! You won't ever have adoption if there's no (or almost no) option! https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-tablet-has-a-genius-featu...
Can you access the ADC in a non-audio context? If not then it's dedicated to audio. The Square reader is like a telephone modem, presumably some app then listens to the "microphone"?
A small correction here: 90%+ of audio I/O ports aren't general-purpose. This is because there are almost always DC-blocker circuits on each output, commonly a series capacitor. With very few exceptions, you can't use your soundcard to provide an accurate DC output such as a control voltage.
Motorola did a sort of add-on thing with their Moto Z some years back. It had swappable back-plates. They launched an extended battery, a speaker, a camera with larger optics and mechanical zoom, a projector attachment... some sort of amazon-branded smart-speaker attachment... they were supposed to kick off an add-on ecosystem but I guess it turned out most people weren't really bothered.
Not quite what you're asking for, it wasn't standard bus connectors or anything.
My Ulefone has TWO. And the other one is heavy-duty industrial type connector. As luck may have it, I redesigned that connector, because Aliexpress was not selling one without some instrument attached. https://github.com/timonoko/Ulefone-Usmart-connector
just a guess, but I've noticed that most app development has concentrated around crossplatform frameworks/languages. If you're writing in JS or Dart or whatever you're not typically going to write a high performance app that has tight integration with an optional peripheral.
As far as I understand the weird ART vs JVM difference also means Java libs are only sometimes going to work (would love to be corrected here though)
Whoever I talk to those says "smartphones are damn too big", and yet no manufacturer produces reasonably-sized phones anymore, because it apparently "they wouldn't sell" / "market size too small".
If this is too difficult, than your use case is orders of magnitude more difficult. Unfortunately everyone tries to sell to the same generic user, with very little actual space for differentiation targeting niches.
People say want smaller phones that fit in their pockets -- myself included. But are they willing to accept the much lower battery life, the smaller text on the screen, and the reduced real estate on the screen?
My solution is simple, I carry two phones a tiny dumb/feature phone for just phone calls and a smartphone for internet access.
No one can phone me on my smartphone as it uses a data-only SIM so it's difficult for Google and others to make sense of the data they steal from me (even then they only receive data garbage for reasons I won't bother to mention here).
It's hardly less convenient as the dumb phone is small enough to fit in my shirt pocket whereas the smartphone is in a trousers pocket.
I disagree. My phone supports UVC video input so I can plug my $25 standards compliant borescope into it, I can plug my standards compliant rme sound card into it for field recordings, and I have a bunch of input peripherals that just 'surprise work' with android now too.
You should have a look at the GATT spec for bluetooth LE and the UART service. It has never been easier to build scientific devices that rely on your phone for compute. The thing is, I think we're actually at the point where it's cheaper/ more reliable/more predictable to stick an nrf52 chip into a peripheral than try to support a physical connection to your phone - I guess from a security standpoint as much as anything else.
There are a _ton_ of scopes and stuff that sit in the prosumer space that leverage your phone. They're just not wired, and I think it makes sense for them not to be.
Typically I wouldn't consider 'read my other replies to understand what I could be talking about' to be a valid or particularly respectful response when it comes to online discussion, but I've read through most of your comments here, and I still can't figure out what the argument you're trying to make is.
For any professional interesting sensor use you'd want something that is certified by a trusted third-party. The costs from this easily would overcome any savings you did in hardware.
And also a lot of professional equipment providers are going sort of this way, building portable devices around a OEM android phone.
It's funny, as my phone (A 2022 Moto Razr) can work as PC, if I plug it into a monitor with it's USB-C port. I can plug it into a monitor, and plug a mouse and keyboard into the monitor's inbuilt USB-C hub, and it works just fine. Has a desktop mode and everything! If the monitor doesn't have a hub in it, I can use the phone as a mouse/touchpad! Plus, if the monitor supports it, it'll even keep it charged rather than using the battery!
And I don't just use it as a gimmick, I use a HDMI/USB-C cable to use it with my TV as a streaming/light gaming setup. Nice to be able to plug it in, kick off a streaming app or Youtube, or play some Minecraft or something on my TV in bed, all comfy.
I had a Huawei P20 Pro that did much the same back in 2018.
I never really used it for much, a bit of light browsing and really just as a gimmick, buit yeah, there was a desktop of sorts and you could use all the apps, and the touchpad/mouse thing worked. You could attach a bluetooth keyboard too, IIRC.
Kindof a shame my iphone doesn't do this (I assume, I haven't tried), but I'm not sure if I'd use it.
Which is quite frankly weird, given that the iPad has fairly robust mouse/keyboard support at this point, and at least some nods towards window management
Actually, I use my iPhone with a USB-C/HDMI cable, the Remote Desktop client and a Bluetooth keyboard when traveling. Some apps will let you use an additional display just fine.
OK so I've now tried this with a new USB-C iphone.
Yeah it's painful to use! You can set up a mouse, and use a physical keyboard for input, but it doesn't attempt to do any more than mirror the screen onto the external device by default.
Huawei's desktop mode was limited, but I think you're right - you can say the iphone has good device compatibility, but there's not a good way to use it docked. Not that the android ones were 'good', but they made an attempt!
I meant the Z Flip 6. Not the fold. The folds have always had fully supported DeX.
The Flips did not have a DP-capable USB-C port until the Flip 5, and still did not support DeX due to thermals. But the Flip 6 has it with a developer option, but only the "new" DeX.
Sorry for the confusion on my side. I thought of the Flip as the OP mentioned the Motorola Razr which is positioned against that, not the Fold.
Can confirm, S22 ultra when plugged into Dell docking box (or whatever its called, not a typical docking station, it just connects with laptop via thick USB-C cable) works out of box, with mouse and keyboard.
Firefox with ublock origin works very well for example. The only thing is it doesn't adjust automatically to native screen resolution (1600p in my case). But its still just an Android, even with full filesystem access it feels vastly subpar to normal desktop PC if I need more than just browsing or other android apps.
My dream was to be able to use VR glasses and something like Samsung dex for an ultra portable coding workstation.
I bought a pair of Viture Pro glasses, but they were pretty unusable for coding for me. Maybe for watching videos would have been OK but not typing / needing to read all areas of the screen.
Boy do I have some bad news for you: Automated Content Recognition [0, 1, 2]. If your Smart TV is connected to the Internet, it can also track what you're watching or doing, even if you're using it as an external monitor [3] (in Dutch).
To answer your question directly: I'm pointing out unexpected privacy pitfalls of using a smart TV's full set of features (i.e. running apps and using it ... as a monitor).
Although I agree with the point of your solution... I disagree with minimizing the danger of such anti-features.
To elaborate, try thinking of your average reasonable person and think of their journey into learning how to preserve their privacy without losing access to the features of the services and products they have paid for. Without a massive effort it is ultimately an oxymoron.
A reasonable person would expect that your (internet connected) smart TV would collect info to help them tailor future products based on their customer's usage (app usage frequency, standard or cable usage frequency, frequency of usage as external monitor). You would not expect to have to watch what you say in front of the such a device because they're literally listening to you [0] (in 2015, you needed to use the remote to use the voice detection service).
Additionally, reasonable user's of smart TV's (and other IoT devices) might feel like they are no longer tracked with their uniquely identifiable information because they turned off "targeted advertising" (if the service allows for setting that option), but that only prevents their advertising ID from being tracked [1].
Moreover, a reasonable person might expect that using a DNS-based blocklist would be a sort of "revocation of consent" to being tracked, but tracking services are savvy when it comes to PII exfiltration [2]:
> [...] We find that personally identifiable information (PII) is exfiltrated to platform-related Internet endpoints and third parties, and that blocklists are generally better at preventing exposure of PII to third parties than to platform-related endpoints. [...]
Finally, there have also been studies that show a lack of transparency when it comes to GDPR requests about the data collected through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) [3].
So, my point is that "just don't use your product for most of its intended use" might be a thought-terminating cliche that prevents us from taking a step forward in stopping the normalization of unreasonable privacy transgressions (PII exfiltration, audio spying by third-party service providers, monitoring of external devices' screens).
TL;DR: I'm of the opinion that the answer is probably "not yet", "it's in the works", or "it's already here, but not yet widely known".
In short, I couldn't find strong conclusive evidence for "yes" or "no".
The Wikipedia article on ACR [0] seems to be quoting CIO-Wiki [1] --- or vice-versa. The statement would imply "yes":
> Real-time audience measurement metrics are now achievable by applying ACR technology into smart TVs, set top boxes and mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. This measurement data is essential to quantify audience consumption to set advertising pricing policies.
On the other hand, a paper on ACR [2] implies it only occurs on TV's (so, this points us towards "no"):
> [...] Unlike traditional online tracking in the web and mobile ecosystems that is typically implemented by third-party libraries/SDKs included in websites/apps, ACR is typically directly integrated in the smart TV’s operating system. [...]
... but then, in its conclusion one could make the case for "not yet" as they reference Microsoft's Recall (this, to me, makes me lean on "not yet"):
> [...] Finally, although different than ACR, our auditing approach can be adopted to assess privacy risks of Recall (Microsoft, 2024) – which analyzes snapshots of the screen using generative AI (Warren, 2024). [...]
Collecting my thoughts on this paper, I'm a bit disappointed that we seem to have a double-standard for the nomenclature: if the content recognition happens on a PC, then it's labeled as "generative AI" (should've probably been called LLM by the authors) and if it takes place on a TV-shaped computer (they're mostly Android TV's, after all, right?) then it's called ACR. I think that it has not been properly articulated that what people are worried about [3] is that Microsoft's Windows Recall is (or will become) "ACR with extra steps".
To conclude (and extend this to the mobile phone domain), I'll leave a "thought experiment": is all the AI processing power on new mobile phones going to be used exclusively by the users, and for the users?
-----
Some nuanced notes...
I'm conflicted about whether to demonize ACR entirely or not. To me, "ACR" means something that is running all the time listening to user's surroundings or screenshotting a user's displayed information for the purposes of improving targeting or tracking their behavior (this seems to match Wikipedia's definition at first glance). I am in part validated by [2] as well:
> [...] At a high level, ACR works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV’s screen and matching it against a content library to detect the content being viewed on the TV. It is essentially a Shazam-like technology for audio/video content on the smart TV (Mohamed Al Elew, 2023).
However, after doing some research, I discovered that a particular knowledge field may be misusing the term (or using the ACR term for lack of a better term like "reverse image search" or "content-based image retrieval" --- CBIR, CBVIR, QBIC --- in their vocabulary), and perhaps in the process inadvertently "whitewashing" the term.
Take, for example, the European Union's Intellectual Property Office's (EUIPO's) discussion paper titled "Automated Content Recognition: Discussion Paper – Phase 2 ‘IP enforcement and management use cases’" [4] (PDF). I think that they are conflating some terms like hashing, fingerprinting, watermarking and labeling it under the ACR term, then they're making valid-sounding use-cases like "smartphone solutions to detect genuine or counterfeit products" (products, by definition, are not content,... so I fail to see how ACR ties in). Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm misreading the paper (I am no IP lawyer...
Not great) Tried replacing my laptop with a Samsung phone+monitor combination on a trip, didn't really work out. Phones are not built for continuous load.
The official DeX docks have a fan built in. This helps a lot especially if you take the phone out of the case. I need to do so anyway because the usb doesn't go in deep enough without it.
Interesting, I wouldn't mind an Android phone that can do similar, but I'm not looking for a clamshell. For anyone else who, like me, is naive about such things, the key search terms seem to be: DisplayPort alternate mode over USB-C. Support seems patchy.
I hate USB-C for laptop charging ports, to fragile for regular use. However I build a few things recently and I love the simplicity.
- External Touch Screen - only needs one cable, usbc, for picture, sound, touch, power! ... (DP mode you mentioned required)
- As power source. My caravan computer (Dell wyse 5070) uses usbc as power source with a cheap DC slot adapter. My laptop charges in usb-c from 60w or more.
- We have 2 Rolands (p-1, s-1) both can use their usbc cable for direct audio in AND out which just works on Linux.
- For the Roland's I can use my phone as sound DAW or source, or both. I can also attach the touch screen, ...
All using the same (cheap and available) cable. Which is amazing and took my whole life to get to.
I think you haven’t considered the luxury goods aspect of higher-end phones. The majority of people buying new phones every year or two don’t carefully study specs, and don’t need to use a PC or laptop at all, or only need a “real” computer for work or specific tasks. Already smartphones serve as the primary internet access device for a majority of internet users.
Sales of new phone models have a lot more to do with perceived status and obsolescence (real or imagined). Actual performance improvements remain largely incremental and irrelevant for the majority of phone users, but perception and fear of obsolescence drive sales anyway. The same goes for camera quality: actually important to a small percentage of users, but perceived as important by a lot more users even if they only post low-quality snapshots online.
Most people don’t need to “upgrade” their purse, sneakers, watch, car, etc. as often as they do. Smartphones have turned into Veblen goods for some, and status display for many more. Spend some time with teenagers. Their fears of not having the newest phone derive entirely from perceived status and fitting in, not from number of USB ports or processor speed.
The number of smartphone users actually interested in using their phone as a PC — with external monitor, keyboard, pointing device — describes a small niche of the smartphone market. Solutions have existed for some time (Samsung Dex and Motorola Ready For, for example). Consumers by and large ignore those offerings and buy for status and FOMO reasons.
The phone manufacturers have so far succeeded in selling disposable and un-repairable devices and feeding the constant upgrade cycle. I have heard many people say they will replace their phone when the screen cracks or it gets too many scratches — the same way they would justify discarding a pair of shoes rather than getting them repaired.
Imagine you only can buy Ferrari SUV from now on (coming with built in dishwasher as standard extra). Whatever your usecase is. Be it a family car for shopping, small utility vechicle for delivering goods to a construction site, want to go camping in Siberia with friends, or need something to plough your fields. With small compromises it could substitute an electric bike or a scooter as well!! Luxury cars for everyone!!
I think lots of people here have little understanding how expensive $600 to a stay at home mom or teen is. Getting an iphone says you got middle class money(even if it was $12/mo for the next 5 years).
There are upper-middle class equivalents of this. Cars come to mind.
It is interesting explaining to a middle class person why I have a $100 crappy phone. "My old one broke, and I have 4 of these $100 phones for my wife's company, so I'm using it until I find a good phone with an Aux port". Ease is everything.
I'm just glad I grew up in the era right before smart phones and have always purchased my own cell phones. I'm just too damn grumpy to pay more than like $250 for a phone. I prefer to be on my computer than my phone. But I can understand for people who seldom are on a computer it probably feels worth it to them to pay $500+ for a phone.
The cheapest iphones have been $400 or $430 for many, many years now.
Divided by the number of hours a phone is used, the amortized cost of having something you want is miniscule. This is the thing moms will be taking precious pictures of their kids with, video calling their families on, shopping for themselves and others, and even watching or listening to entertainment.
If there’s one thing that people can justify spending more on for more utility, it’s a smartphone. Obviously, I’m not referring to spending $1k more for a 1 TB Pro Max, but spending an extra $500 is going to make sense to many people for purposes outside of showing off.
> If there’s one thing that people can justify spending more on for more utility, it’s a smartphone.
For a dumb device ? Max 200 €. Browsing the internet on a smartphone is terrible, the GUI is terrible, typing is terrible. DOS level multitasking. Spying machine.
No way i will pay more for this.
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[ 438 ms ] story [ 9193 ms ] threadMy pixel 9 is essentially flat, and the battery life is plenty for a couple of days.
Either way, my point is that with a case the pixel 9 is mostly flat, and has a battery life that I can't complain about. How big the battery is physically is unimportant to me. Logically it's big enough.
Most of the world is not using the latest version of Android, and you don't really hear about viruses/malware like we used to with Windows machines in the '90s and '00s.
https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/endpoint-security/new...
I agree the lens bulges are a pain in the arse, but I want a good camera.
You can buy low-end phones with minimal bump from the likes of Motorola and Nokia if cameras are not important to you. But I want my higher-end (not necessarily premium, but in that direction) phones to keep coming with better and better cameras please, and if that means a bit of a bulge then fine.
So nearly 50% of the demographic is buying those phones simply for the camera, and a big screen, nothing else.
I’ve noticed its typically just men (including me), who dont care about the camera much at all, and just want a normie phone that can run most apps.
The average use case I bet isn't making use of 4000 plus pixels
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10001955/
[1] https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/smartbook.htm
If Intel hadn't cancelled their x86 smartphone chip (Broxton?), I wouldn't have been surprised to see an x86 Windows Phone with a desktop mode.
Any hybrid would be a compromise for me. I do have multiple systems--almost certainly more than I need.
I do think they're trending in that direction but I actually like that they're not pushing people faster than feels comfortable. I expect to see a convergence of iPads and at least MacBook Airs but we're not quite there yet.
Some people insist on self sabotaging. It's sad.
It's not like kids ever wanted computers for schoolwork in general...
Saying they wanted computers for schoolwork, is another matter.
Growing up without access to a proper computer still seems weird to me. How do we expect kids to build computing literacy?
Now they want to sell services, while Apple and Google control all major endpoints.
The other issue is demand. I suspect that the number of people who’d like their phone to double as a computer is actually rather small — non-technophiles just do everything on their phone these days, and increasingly the main reason anybody keeps around a computer is for more “big iron” sorts of use cases that are too demanding for smartphones. The market for a converged computer-phone device is basically down to people whose needs would be served by a Chromebook, but would prefer an external monitor and keyboard which is rather niche.
I would probably come down to separate devices however, in the interests of security and continuity. A phone is much more likely to be lost or stolen than a computer on a desk at home. I keep my really important stuff on my computer, and try to keep my phone as disposable as possible.
One could buy a cheap mini-PC and put some flavor of Linux on it and it’d serve office software duty for upwards of 10 years without issue. Even accounting for FOSS aftermarket Android distros, smartphone hardware doesn’t have that kind of longevity.
Using only one device would mean a downgrade in my work setup - one screen less. Moreover, if I'm traveling and have to work somewhere on the fly, a laptop offers a decent keyboard and tolerable screen size by itself. And there is a variety of options on offer (larger screens, lighter laptop, more computing power), so I can pick the optimal one for me.
As such, I don't see a smartphone replacing my daily driver, nor my "planned to work while travelling" driver. Best-case scenario it'd a below-average compromise. But the laptop market offers enough choice that I can get a better compromise for less there.
And yet, this question is here - somehow no one really uses it or even knows about it.
Microsoft tried to do it with Windows Phone years ago, but phones were way too slow and Windows on ARM was an even worse prospect at the time, so that died too.
It worked well but of course Android would kill any Ubuntu process at random if RAM usage reached a certain threshold, so I wouldn't use it for anything heavy. I remember I was able to run a Ruby on Rails project of mine plus emacs. Slower than my laptop but still decent. The real problem was the limited amount of RAM of the tablet and the insecurity deriving from random process terminations.
If I was a student with Chromebook-style needs (browser-based tools) it would be worth considering instead of a laptop.
I think other commenters are right that this would cannibalize Apples own products, which is a shame since I think it would be awesome to have a unified computing device.
MacOS already runs on arm64 and the iphone has wireless charging and bluetooth, so I don’t think there is a lot stopping Apple from doing this.
Despite the fact that the largest iPhone and smallest iPad are less than 2" difference, the $130 Apple Pencil will not work with an iPhone Pro Max, and both devices run different operating systems with arbitrary features.
One of the biggest complaints about their latest iPad was that it's so powerful yet limited by iPadOS. I feel the same way about my iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Apple wants you to have an iMac as your desktop, a MacBook for your mobile device, an iPad to watch videos, and an iPhone to bring with you.
I still can't do that with any Microsoft system. I've been able to do it with Apple devices for a good 5-10 years.
I always had the impression it's just iOS with a slightly different configuration.
Plasma, GNOME, Phosh, it all just works.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/14/conti...
Every day since a couple years now.
> I struggle to recall the last time an app jerked and juddered into life.
I don’t. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t that way at first. It’s just that over time my phone just slowed down. Purging it of its data and unused software did nothing, I just had less and less available memory over time, and maps grew slower and slower, and it was becoming increasingly impossible to open several, sometimes just two applications at the same time.
---
That being said, I do agree with the core point of the article: phones are plenty fast enough.
Heck, I’m pretty sure a snappy modern UI with all the bells and whistles except perhaps a voice assistant requires less than a tenth of the computing power of the average phone. We just need reasonably performing software. Not crazy optimised software, just something that makes decent use of the CPU and GPU, and doesn’t consume too much RAM.
But the market won’t even give us that. You know what, keep that up a few years and I’ll seriously think of switching back to a flip phone.
---
Edit: I have a Xiaomi M1804C3CG.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
Also, despite Android fanboys getting triggered, I never said that there are no good Android phones. There are. And the median Android phone is more powerful than an iPhone for the money (especially non-US models). The differentiator is that Apple doesn't ship iPhones that are too awful.
If you want to replace a battery on a relatively modern Samsung flagship, you will likely swear, drink, and/or curse the engineers that decided "Glass and glue is good enough"
Perhaps you have malware installed on your device?
I’ve heard that as systems update, they keep the old stuff around until you run out of memory. I haven’t checked, and I have yet to reset my phone to factory setting, but if that’s what’s really happening, that’s still unacceptable.
One reason for low memory being responsible for slow loading times, is on the fly (de)compression, to save what little memory the phone has left.
Multiple different brands have the same buggy OS, even those which used to be household names. This must've saved the companies at least $20 000.
iPhone? They throttle the CPU to make the battery look like it's not dying.
Back in the mid-2010s when I was broke and getting by on a worn out hand-me-down iPhone I would’ve loved to have that feature. It really sucks when your phone dies in the middle of a business call at 40% battery thanks to one of those aforementioned spikes.
It looks like that model has 2GB of ram. I can certainly understand running into performance issues with those specs.
So, it's hard to call it a PC at the end of the day IMO.
I'm not trying to dismiss your perspective here, I think you have a real point about the intimacy and personal importance of modern smartphone usage. From a layperson perspective, you're absolutely correct that these deliver on the promise of "personal computer."
But to those who choose to spend more time learning and understanding them, computers are (very flexible) tools, and specifically they're tools where you get to choose the computation being performed. This is why, to me at least, (most) mobile devices simply can't be "personal computers."
Smartphones and tablets are still useful to people with that perspective - but I see them not as a computer but as an appliance. I turn it on, I turn it off, I maybe get to fiddle with a few knobs, but most of it is a black box that hopefully "just works."
And hey, I like that convenience - as long as it's not the only way I have to interact with technology.
So, it may seem pedantic, but I think it is worth distinguishing true general purpose computers from phones. They are absolutely personal - a "personal smart appliance", if you will, but not a personal computer at the end of the day.
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/motorola-atrix-4g-att
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-u...
This was precisely the target of the Motorola Atrix. They sold a netbook-like "shell" with a monitor and keyboard, and when you plugged the Atrix smartphone in it became an Ubuntu webtop device.
That seems hugely important to such a conversation.
There's so many reasons why it's hard to say this is really unwanted. Atrix was a boutique not mainstream product so who knows what would have happened had it been generally usable.
At the time we didn't have anything like usb-c, so it was all special peripherals and displays. Now though a decent % of displays do have USB-c with power, and that's totally different starting conditions. Especially if that display also has a keyboard and mouse plugged in, which many do!
Commercial success requires paving of cow paths, needs a low impedance route to mass success. We haven't been in a spot where that's ever been remotely possible before.
Do I think Android on display is going to totally take over & dominate soon? No, no I don't. But mass availability and a world capable of supporting - making use of this capability has just arrived, and this really lets us get started with these ubiquitous & pervasive computing ideas that, so far/until now, have had to be bespoke offering.
Different but also similar, it feels like game streaming has some reasonable popularity too now, and it's another case of using interconnect across devices & peripherals that I think a lot of people have really grown into & deeply enjoy being able to do. It's still a small segment of people, relatively, but to me it speaks of adoption curves & how success is often extremely slow, how there are real fans who feel great joy & happiness, without the rest of the world being much tuned in or aware.
What the people definitely didn't want was the performance of 2011 smartphone for desktop. The use case didn't fail, that device failed because the limits at the time made the phone desktop impractical. And I remember it not being a stellar smartphone either.
But every smartphone also failed until they didn't fail anymore because they were good enough. Phones today have astounding levels of performance so they can easily serve as desktops.
Starting the discussion from impractical attempts made "ages" ago (in tech terms) is a nice bit of historical trivia but not an indictment of the "phone desktop" idea. It's like starting every discussion about EVs with how early 20th century EVs failed because people don't want EVs.
Can you play Cyberpunk with desktop quality on it?
What kind of software environment do you expect when you connect your mouse, keyboard and 22" screen to a device where everything is geared toward touch input on a 6" screen?
It's not an unsolvable problem and I do think there is demand for it if done right. But it's not a solved problem either.
> it's not a solved problem either
Never said it is. But we can't use one experience from the baby years of the smartphone to proclaim what won't work or won't have demand today. If we never try to solve a problem, especially because "it didn't work on the first attempt ages ago", then we'll never solve a problem.
As for convergence I'm not so sure. The only place I use a desk is at work and even if a phone could optimally run a docker stack and everything else I need there wouldn't really be a benefit to me. I guess taking a phone home instead of the work MBP would be a bit easier but meh, I carry a bag anyway and then I would need something to plug it into at home.
For personal I use my MBP on the couch. If it was a laptop-like dock that my phone slipped into, ok, that would work but A) Apple will never do that and B) what would the benefit be? I doubt it would be a ton cheaper and I'd need to keep my phone more up to date than I do now because I do want a powerful laptop.
In principle I like the idea, but in practice I don't think it would work for me. What I'd be more interested in is running macOS on an iPad.
Updates are anyway a joke, so I stop caring for that to the point I only have a passing interest on what Android team shows off at Google I/O.
Apple stuff I only use via my employer/customers, but same reasoning applies regarding features I care about.
The real question I have is why software keeps getting progressively slower requiring faster phones. I don't buy the "devs are lazy / management pushes for frequent releases, so devs use poor expensive platforms like electron" or "all manufactures conspire to make phones that age too fast" - both devs and companies have always been like that, I don't see any recent fundamental shift in that. And it is not like current dev experience is somehow fundamentally different and easier then 10y ago - we use similar kinds of abstraction to do similar things (maybe ~20% more productive and simple?). I am genuinely confused.
Looks like it... exists. And not much more. I doubt it's a high priority for PMOS devs given that lot of internal hardware is still only partially working or not at all.
I really wish there was some startup that made a relatively affordable Linux phone that is competitive with modern phones in performance, stability, and support.
I get jerks and judders all the time, but it's 100% the fault of the software.
This whole space has been cursed. You can hack some old Nokias or Androids to run windows on arm and have driver issues. You can use a handheld pc console like the GPD Win and get the LTE addon. But there’s no “this phone is a PC“ offering that is really viable.
I suppose having a Pinephone and running Linux is the best option right now.
I used a lap dock for a while (UPERFECT) which allowed me to plug a device via usb c and it would turn the phone into a basic laptop.
I wish there were serious efforts.
ChromeOS is actively being re-implemented to run on top of the Android kernel.
Reasons for this may range from merely wanting to minimize kernel/driver work, to something more strategic, and nobody high enough up that chain to know seems to be willing to risk their NDA.
> there’s no “this phone is a PC“ offering that is really viable.
> I wish there were serious efforts.
You should really google "Samsung Dex".
A huge range of features comes to mind from Geiger counters, oscilloscopes, sound level measurement, light intensity, etc , etc. The potential to expand the smartphone capability is enormous yet no manufacturer has tackled it. Why not?
Why aren't there multiple USB ports? By now why don't all phones use USB-3? Why isn't there general purpose D/A and A/D ports/outputs for instrumentation? Why don't they include a GPIB-like bus to connect to things? Why can't we use the screen as an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of say 100MHz?
Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).
I find it amazing that no smartphone manufacturer has branched out into this field. Such potential and no one is servicing it. Phone manufacturers are missing out by not servicing this scientific/techie measurement market.
Why, say, doesn't Fairphone provide a range of interchangeable ports/modules that can changed for different functions, to add additional sensors, etc.?
although i would buy one.
Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0. There do exist phones with multiple USB ports, and there do exist plenty of USB3 capable phones. Instrumentation and measurement is an extremely specialized field, and the number of people that would maybe find use out of it would quickly switch to a more useful interface for something like an oscilloscope.
For your general purpose adc and dac, they already make one: it’s called a usb-c audio adapter.
How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement.
Moreover, this article alone has raised the matter of additional features.
Anyway, it's only a matter of time until some (likely small) manufacturer breaks the boring mold and steps out. That's inevitable because the market is already saturated with phones that all have exactly the same features.
I said approximately 0, when compared to smartphone sales… which it is. I don’t need a survey to know that, since the vast vast vast majority of people using phones don’t even know what an oscilloscope, a DAC, or an ADC is. If you think that’s untrue, I’d suggest widening your horizons a bit.
Also, I’d think that you don’t work in test and measurement. I use test equipment in my day job and I wouldn’t trust the output of a phone if I’m doing actual production work. You need calibrated equipment for that. Maybe okay for debugging, but there’s tons of cheap measurement equipment that works just fine for general purpose debugging and has a much better UI than anything you’d get on a touch screen.
1. so incredibly convenient to always have with you, that everyone's willing to overlook shortcomings compared to dedicated equipment. Prime example: camera.
2. Offer a new type of use that is widely considered desirable. Example: mobile access to Internet.
Most use cases either cater to too few people and/or fall into the category "those who'd really care, already have dedicated equipment which is better". With flagship phones costing more and more, that equipment is probably also cheaper - or, at least, is price tag is not that outlandish.
Even replacing laptops probably won't catch on, simply because companies can easily provide a good laptop for half the price of a flagship phone (if not less). So they're not going to facilitate that. And if the boss isn't on board, would you want to use your own private phone as your primary work laptop?
The GP seems to be basically saying the same thing as many others have expressed. They want their phone to basically be a PC. Whether that involves upgrading, installing your own OS, or otherwise just being able to use it for an arbitrary workload.
I don't know why the market is such, that expensive phones remove features, such as extra sim card slots, sd card slots or head phone jacks. It doesn't seem impossible that Samsung could find room in their lineup of 8000 phones to have a ruggedised phone, with some kind of standardised interface on the back.
especially, as increasingly you go to a restaurant and the waiter has a phone/ tablet. and I'm sure there are many other industries that could do with basically a phone, that does one extra specialised thing, be that an rfid scanner, or a bore scope, or a label printer.
There are many back cases for specialised functionality like PoS, Ir camera etc.
Also, with many cases you can have devices connecting wirelessly via bluetooth - e.g. I bought a bluetooth trichiscope recently.
Making a specialised phone instead of a plugin is a way more expensive option. And in risky if the market is so small that nobody did a plugin first.
There were I think two companies that tried to build a modular phone where you could eg replace camera with a module of your own design - the issue was that they were bulkier and more expensive than a regular design - you can’t cheat physics.
Also, how much more would you be willing to pay for such a phone? Could you pay 2-3x the price and be happy with upgrades every 3-5 years, and the phone having electronics that are 1-3 years behind the top of the line ones on the start? Because that’s the reality of production with niche products.
> Even replacing laptops probably won't catch on, simply because companies can easily provide a good laptop for half the price of a flagship phone
You’re comparing top of the range phones to low end laptops. A low to mid range phone can be bought from a reputable manufacturer (Samsung) for about £200 and it has plenty of processing to do email, video calls, PowerPoint, and basic spreadsheets. My wife works for the government and I’m pretty sure one of those phones would be about as responsive as the hunk of junk they provide her with, and for half the price.
Bonus there is that it's one place for all your data.
Alternatively, on the data side I've been shocked at how cheap storage is now. I bought a 256gb usb stick shipped for £10. I've got tiny 4tb external drives. You can get terabyte microsd cards! It'd be pretty nice to have a setup where the device is intended to be blank and you just pop your data card in. I know it's more complex but not that complex for what would to me feel like a fairly sci-fi thing.
Honestly, I'd love to be surprised and see everyone switching to docking setups everywhere. But I just think the positives over current working modes are too small to gain the needed traction. And that's before considering downsides other than investment costs/overcoming network effects.
I've worked in one of the prototype laboratories of one of the biggest electronics companies in the world where we actually developed communication equipment.
Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea is preposterous.
Given your comment, one has to ask what you do and at what level.
Conflating ideas and 'reading' stuff that isn't actually there is the single biggest problem with the internet. .
>> Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).
Your words, not mine. Without more context (which you didn't provide) it's unreasonable to expect me to understand what you mean (you, in fact, advocate I don't 'read stuff' that isn't actually there) outside of replacing actual test and measurement equipment.
Of all the people you interacted with in any way, shape or form this year, what percentage of those would benefit from this?
It rounds to 0, assuming you’re not a shut-in
What phone do you use now and are you satisfied with it?
Tell me that and I may be able to then figure where you are coming from. BTW, read my comment to f6v.
> How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
I responded with:
> just look outside in the real world?
That’s totally relevant to you asking why no mass-market phones support increasingly niche features that ~0% of the population need or want, and you expanding on this by saying “me and one other person I know want this”…
I can't make it any clearer, sorry I don't speak Klingon.
Or
> “Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0."
> How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
Pick one
Children who play Fortnite on the go are a much bigger market and will always be. Smartphones are content consumption devices.
The point I put forward is what I and a small select section of the market wants as features—NOT what's on offer from manufacturers now.
The argument people are putting here is that manufacturers would not serve that market. These are two separate issues. Isn't that clear?
When someone makes what I want then I'll buy it. BTW, I've not suggested anything that cannot be made now with existing technology.
Instead, manufacturers are removing important features such as not including FM radio and 3.5mm headphone sockets. These are the first two specs I look for on a phone before I buy it. If they're not included I'm not interested. Full stop!
In brief, the lowest common denominator is NOT what I want. The market has to be more diverse. That in part is what the article is about and why I commented.
Imagine somebody asking for phones that have a built-in Swiss army knife because there is a (tiny) segment of the market who would benefit from it.
Before it makes sense to integrate these features to the phone, you would expect to see a thriving ecosystem of third-party external dongles providing the same, for example.
The market is not more diverse because there is no money to be made by making it more diverse. You underestimate the cost just as much as you overestimate the size of the market segment that wants those features.
I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now!
All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.
If Fairphone were to provide a slot I'm damn sure there'd be call to use it. Think Raspberry Pi and all its ports, just transfer the concept to a phone that's almost suitable now.
Fairphones devices are, frankly, bad value and not particularly interesting. Being able to “upgrade” components is not very useful, if those components are already years behind. Also, fairphone doesn’t allow this! You just can replace components with the same kind… which just makes repairing easier.
> All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.
You have one. It’s called the USB-C port. Make whatever you want with it, it’s widely supported and compatible.
It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub. It used to be they were all USB-C to USB-A but there are starting to USB-C only hubs.
First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated.
Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.
Frankly, is this is a first-class fucking nuisance. Why can't I have direct compatibility with my PCs and laptops?
To get my phones to do what I want I have to root them and even this isn't fully satisfactory. Rooting is a pain and takes a lot of time to do it correctly and I'd prefer not to do it
With OTC there is no consistency across phone manufacturers. Why the hell not?
Also, why are phone manufacturers removing micro SD slots from phones?
More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?
Now if I go to that despised Chinese company Huawei I can get NTFS support by default (on OTG at least). That Huawei can offer NTFS as a standard feature and most others do not tells me a lot about the oligopoly-like smartphone market.
People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.
There's been fuck-all worthwhile innovation in recent years.
First, multiple USB ports are bulky, and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about. I don't need an extra port for the majority of my uses.
> Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.
The timeouts are for idle time. If you have a long period of idle time, you aren't using the device... which consumes power from your tiny phone battery. It's very reasonable for the uses most people use them for. I'd agree it would be nice to have the ability to disable the timeout, but I can't speak to what every phone manufacturer is doing.
> More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?
What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways.
> People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.
And what exactly is wrong with that? Laptops also haven't had "innovation" in the sense you're describing in years either. They serve their purpose, do what they do well, and get marginally better year over year. It's fine.
One of the reasons why my reply is late is because of exFAT problems. Right, I don't expect you to believe that but it's true—see my comment at the end.
exFAT may have better compatibility but it's about the worst file system ever invented. Have you ever thought why Microsoft made it freely available and not NTFS? Yes, everyone believes the MS mantra that exFAT uses fewer resources than NTFS and that's true but it seems few are aware about how diabolical this file system actually is and the high potential it has for losing one's data.
Why? Well it has only one FAT table and not two, clobber that and one is stuffed big-time—and often many people lose data this way.
Why would Microsoft eliminate the second backup FAT table in exFAT when it was proven so valuable in earlier versions of FAT—especially given exFAT's higher capacity where the loss of data would be even more disastrous? (Even Blind Freddy ought to be able to see the necessity of having a second FAT to protect one's data.)
Let me give you an example: about 12 months ago I was transferring some data stored on my smartphone's 512GB microSD card to my PC when I lost about 231GB of data! That's no small loss and I've still not recovered it.
You may well ask how that happened. Simple, the SD was removed from the phone and placed in the PC's USB slot to move a small percentage of files to the PC. Unfortunately, I removed the SD before the write process had completed and it clobbered the FAT and everything was deleted, the card was not only devoid of all files but also according to Windows it was now unformatted.
OK, so it was my fault, that I accept—doubly so because I didn't follow the golden rule of copying everything first before deleting the source files (although in this case that wouldn't have saved the files that I'd not moved).
I tried the usual unearase utilities/procedures and only recovered shrapnel. Of course, what else would one expect when file systems don't store files in contiguous sectors. This is yet another antiquated idea where data integrity is traded for speed without adequate fallback/safety protections.
You probably are asking why I removed the SD from the phone instead of transferring the data by OTG. That's easily explained too, OTG on phones is inordinately slow except for the very few that use USB3—not to mention the fact that Android (especially so since v10) won't allow one to copy data from say the Android directory. (In this instance, even though I wasn't copying all the files there were enough to make removing the SD to provide a worthwhile saving in time (it had over 300k files stored on it).)
Fortunately, most of the files were already backed up so only a small incremental amount of nonessential data was lost and I've put the SD aside until I get around to mirroring it in case I ever want to recover them. Incidentally, this isn't the only time I've killed an exFAT's table but it's the only time I've lost data (other times the data was already backed up). I'm not alone I could tell stories of others who I know personally who've lost data in similar circumstances.
I've experimented with exFAT both on SD cards and SSDs and have come to the conclusion that if one wants to kill all data on such a dive quickly without secure delete so it looks like a new drive then all one has to do is to disconnect it during a write operation. It's that catastrophic.
Now comparing exFAT with NTFS is like chalk and cheese. If I'd been using NTFS then none of that would have happened. NTFS is a proper journaling file system with good inbuilt protections, it's hardy and will take much abuse before significant data is lost. Moreover, the argument that NTFS uses large resources and overhead is now mute—we're long past the days...
There was some 10 years ago a project from Google to make the smartphone modular (Ara ?). It died in its infancy.
But we are seeing some signs this might change. And insure hope it does, in a big way. A hub can be ok, but with the need to mix display out & peripherals and power, in fancy ways, USB3 really is a limited option. And alas USB4 fixes many of the constraints but is way too high end alas alas alas. Anyways here's an upcoming very cheap tablet with multiple ports, and reports are a lot more are coming. Given the marginal cost of ports, it's about frelling time! Do it! You won't ever have adoption if there's no (or almost no) option! https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-tablet-has-a-genius-featu...
There is one, it's the headphone jack. (Or dongle.)
It's obviously useful, that's how Square launched their card reader business.
Not quite what you're asking for, it wasn't standard bus connectors or anything.
As far as I understand the weird ART vs JVM difference also means Java libs are only sometimes going to work (would love to be corrected here though)
If this is too difficult, than your use case is orders of magnitude more difficult. Unfortunately everyone tries to sell to the same generic user, with very little actual space for differentiation targeting niches.
The smaller iPhones didn't sell well.
No one can phone me on my smartphone as it uses a data-only SIM so it's difficult for Google and others to make sense of the data they steal from me (even then they only receive data garbage for reasons I won't bother to mention here).
It's hardly less convenient as the dumb phone is small enough to fit in my shirt pocket whereas the smartphone is in a trousers pocket.
You should have a look at the GATT spec for bluetooth LE and the UART service. It has never been easier to build scientific devices that rely on your phone for compute. The thing is, I think we're actually at the point where it's cheaper/ more reliable/more predictable to stick an nrf52 chip into a peripheral than try to support a physical connection to your phone - I guess from a security standpoint as much as anything else.
There are a _ton_ of scopes and stuff that sit in the prosumer space that leverage your phone. They're just not wired, and I think it makes sense for them not to be.
Models off phones with these features integrated please?
Where can I find them on, say, GSMArena.com?
I think the actual need right now is the other way around, don't build new devices and instruments, rather support existing devices.
And also a lot of professional equipment providers are going sort of this way, building portable devices around a OEM android phone.
I would _love_ a smartphone with a GPIB connector. Something like https://www.starte-e.net/product/ieee-488-gpib-cn24pin-metal... /s
And I don't just use it as a gimmick, I use a HDMI/USB-C cable to use it with my TV as a streaming/light gaming setup. Nice to be able to plug it in, kick off a streaming app or Youtube, or play some Minecraft or something on my TV in bed, all comfy.
I never really used it for much, a bit of light browsing and really just as a gimmick, buit yeah, there was a desktop of sorts and you could use all the apps, and the touchpad/mouse thing worked. You could attach a bluetooth keyboard too, IIRC.
Kindof a shame my iphone doesn't do this (I assume, I haven't tried), but I'm not sure if I'd use it.
I might give it a go when I upgrade to a USB-C model.
Works fine. I don't know if you can format drives, but you can definitely read and write to external disks and network shares.
Yeah it's painful to use! You can set up a mouse, and use a physical keyboard for input, but it doesn't attempt to do any more than mirror the screen onto the external device by default.
Huawei's desktop mode was limited, but I think you're right - you can say the iphone has good device compatibility, but there's not a good way to use it docked. Not that the android ones were 'good', but they made an attempt!
I meant the Z Flip 6. Not the fold. The folds have always had fully supported DeX.
The Flips did not have a DP-capable USB-C port until the Flip 5, and still did not support DeX due to thermals. But the Flip 6 has it with a developer option, but only the "new" DeX.
Sorry for the confusion on my side. I thought of the Flip as the OP mentioned the Motorola Razr which is positioned against that, not the Fold.
Firefox with ublock origin works very well for example. The only thing is it doesn't adjust automatically to native screen resolution (1600p in my case). But its still just an Android, even with full filesystem access it feels vastly subpar to normal desktop PC if I need more than just browsing or other android apps.
I bought a pair of Viture Pro glasses, but they were pretty unusable for coding for me. Maybe for watching videos would have been OK but not typing / needing to read all areas of the screen.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41658828
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41669765
[3]: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/227186/samsung-automatische-cont...
To answer your question directly: I'm pointing out unexpected privacy pitfalls of using a smart TV's full set of features (i.e. running apps and using it ... as a monitor).
Although I agree with the point of your solution... I disagree with minimizing the danger of such anti-features.
To elaborate, try thinking of your average reasonable person and think of their journey into learning how to preserve their privacy without losing access to the features of the services and products they have paid for. Without a massive effort it is ultimately an oxymoron.
A reasonable person would expect that your (internet connected) smart TV would collect info to help them tailor future products based on their customer's usage (app usage frequency, standard or cable usage frequency, frequency of usage as external monitor). You would not expect to have to watch what you say in front of the such a device because they're literally listening to you [0] (in 2015, you needed to use the remote to use the voice detection service).
Additionally, reasonable user's of smart TV's (and other IoT devices) might feel like they are no longer tracked with their uniquely identifiable information because they turned off "targeted advertising" (if the service allows for setting that option), but that only prevents their advertising ID from being tracked [1].
Moreover, a reasonable person might expect that using a DNS-based blocklist would be a sort of "revocation of consent" to being tracked, but tracking services are savvy when it comes to PII exfiltration [2]:
> [...] We find that personally identifiable information (PII) is exfiltrated to platform-related Internet endpoints and third parties, and that blocklists are generally better at preventing exposure of PII to third parties than to platform-related endpoints. [...]
Finally, there have also been studies that show a lack of transparency when it comes to GDPR requests about the data collected through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) [3].
So, my point is that "just don't use your product for most of its intended use" might be a thought-terminating cliche that prevents us from taking a step forward in stopping the normalization of unreasonable privacy transgressions (PII exfiltration, audio spying by third-party service providers, monitoring of external devices' screens).
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31296188
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20908128/smart-tv-survei...
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03447
[3]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/electronic-electrical-engineering/news...
Or are you saying this is built into phones too?
In short, I couldn't find strong conclusive evidence for "yes" or "no".
The Wikipedia article on ACR [0] seems to be quoting CIO-Wiki [1] --- or vice-versa. The statement would imply "yes":
> Real-time audience measurement metrics are now achievable by applying ACR technology into smart TVs, set top boxes and mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. This measurement data is essential to quantify audience consumption to set advertising pricing policies.
On the other hand, a paper on ACR [2] implies it only occurs on TV's (so, this points us towards "no"):
> [...] Unlike traditional online tracking in the web and mobile ecosystems that is typically implemented by third-party libraries/SDKs included in websites/apps, ACR is typically directly integrated in the smart TV’s operating system. [...]
... but then, in its conclusion one could make the case for "not yet" as they reference Microsoft's Recall (this, to me, makes me lean on "not yet"):
> [...] Finally, although different than ACR, our auditing approach can be adopted to assess privacy risks of Recall (Microsoft, 2024) – which analyzes snapshots of the screen using generative AI (Warren, 2024). [...]
Collecting my thoughts on this paper, I'm a bit disappointed that we seem to have a double-standard for the nomenclature: if the content recognition happens on a PC, then it's labeled as "generative AI" (should've probably been called LLM by the authors) and if it takes place on a TV-shaped computer (they're mostly Android TV's, after all, right?) then it's called ACR. I think that it has not been properly articulated that what people are worried about [3] is that Microsoft's Windows Recall is (or will become) "ACR with extra steps".
To conclude (and extend this to the mobile phone domain), I'll leave a "thought experiment": is all the AI processing power on new mobile phones going to be used exclusively by the users, and for the users?
-----
Some nuanced notes...
I'm conflicted about whether to demonize ACR entirely or not. To me, "ACR" means something that is running all the time listening to user's surroundings or screenshotting a user's displayed information for the purposes of improving targeting or tracking their behavior (this seems to match Wikipedia's definition at first glance). I am in part validated by [2] as well:
> [...] At a high level, ACR works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV’s screen and matching it against a content library to detect the content being viewed on the TV. It is essentially a Shazam-like technology for audio/video content on the smart TV (Mohamed Al Elew, 2023).
However, after doing some research, I discovered that a particular knowledge field may be misusing the term (or using the ACR term for lack of a better term like "reverse image search" or "content-based image retrieval" --- CBIR, CBVIR, QBIC --- in their vocabulary), and perhaps in the process inadvertently "whitewashing" the term.
Take, for example, the European Union's Intellectual Property Office's (EUIPO's) discussion paper titled "Automated Content Recognition: Discussion Paper – Phase 2 ‘IP enforcement and management use cases’" [4] (PDF). I think that they are conflating some terms like hashing, fingerprinting, watermarking and labeling it under the ACR term, then they're making valid-sounding use-cases like "smartphone solutions to detect genuine or counterfeit products" (products, by definition, are not content,... so I fail to see how ACR ties in). Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm misreading the paper (I am no IP lawyer...
Thankfully my job was all about reducing rendering latency to prevent people from getting nauseous, so thermal throttling was outside of my scope.
- External Touch Screen - only needs one cable, usbc, for picture, sound, touch, power! ... (DP mode you mentioned required)
- As power source. My caravan computer (Dell wyse 5070) uses usbc as power source with a cheap DC slot adapter. My laptop charges in usb-c from 60w or more.
- We have 2 Rolands (p-1, s-1) both can use their usbc cable for direct audio in AND out which just works on Linux.
- For the Roland's I can use my phone as sound DAW or source, or both. I can also attach the touch screen, ...
All using the same (cheap and available) cable. Which is amazing and took my whole life to get to.
https://furilabs.com/
Don't ever expect goggle to have your interests at the core of their plans or products...
Sales of new phone models have a lot more to do with perceived status and obsolescence (real or imagined). Actual performance improvements remain largely incremental and irrelevant for the majority of phone users, but perception and fear of obsolescence drive sales anyway. The same goes for camera quality: actually important to a small percentage of users, but perceived as important by a lot more users even if they only post low-quality snapshots online.
Most people don’t need to “upgrade” their purse, sneakers, watch, car, etc. as often as they do. Smartphones have turned into Veblen goods for some, and status display for many more. Spend some time with teenagers. Their fears of not having the newest phone derive entirely from perceived status and fitting in, not from number of USB ports or processor speed.
The number of smartphone users actually interested in using their phone as a PC — with external monitor, keyboard, pointing device — describes a small niche of the smartphone market. Solutions have existed for some time (Samsung Dex and Motorola Ready For, for example). Consumers by and large ignore those offerings and buy for status and FOMO reasons.
The phone manufacturers have so far succeeded in selling disposable and un-repairable devices and feeding the constant upgrade cycle. I have heard many people say they will replace their phone when the screen cracks or it gets too many scratches — the same way they would justify discarding a pair of shoes rather than getting them repaired.
There are upper-middle class equivalents of this. Cars come to mind.
It is interesting explaining to a middle class person why I have a $100 crappy phone. "My old one broke, and I have 4 of these $100 phones for my wife's company, so I'm using it until I find a good phone with an Aux port". Ease is everything.
Divided by the number of hours a phone is used, the amortized cost of having something you want is miniscule. This is the thing moms will be taking precious pictures of their kids with, video calling their families on, shopping for themselves and others, and even watching or listening to entertainment.
If there’s one thing that people can justify spending more on for more utility, it’s a smartphone. Obviously, I’m not referring to spending $1k more for a 1 TB Pro Max, but spending an extra $500 is going to make sense to many people for purposes outside of showing off.
If this was true, Apple would not be the major US player.
Everything you mentioned doesnt cost $500, it cost $200 on a nexus a decade ago.
Also, a Nexus wasn’t $200 in 2014, and in no way was a $200 mobile phone in 2014 as good as a $500 iPhone (or any other $500 phone).
For a dumb device ? Max 200 €. Browsing the internet on a smartphone is terrible, the GUI is terrible, typing is terrible. DOS level multitasking. Spying machine. No way i will pay more for this.
Cameras too might be hitting diminishing returns