Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I don't like smartphones

devever.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 294 posts

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#161

Post by hlandau »

joosters wrote: post #39

This person would be happier moving to a pre-computer environment - take a look at their pet hates: https://violations.devever.net/products - including: * AMD x86 CPUs * Intel x86 CPUs ...leaving, ARM CPUs, I guess? Windows ARM machines are also on the list. (And surely ARMs should be blacklisted according to his reasoning; he is unhappy with Intel's secure enclave, while ARM has similar features). Some people will n…

Look, I use x86 CPUs. I don't have much choice in the matter. But frankly, this stuff needs to be tracked, because there's too much of it to keep in my brain anymore, and if you look at Intel CPUs in particular, the level of malevolence seems to increase with every new tick/tock.

Although there are some interesting moves in the works: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Talos-Se... Expensive though.

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#162

Post by mikegioia »

barnabee wrote: post #78
woofiefa wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people probably don't need free speech either, but we don't remove the possibility anyway. There are also plenty of examples of mobile devices being infected even though the user didn't have root access.

We don't remove the possibility of open hardware either, there are options for partially or completely open smartphones (as a quick web search will attest) but the most popular products sold by Samsung, Apple, et al. are not. Equally, as for free speech, there are options for completely uncensored speech (although fewer than you think, and even then if you say certain things you'd better hope they can't be traced bac…

This is ridiculous. Name ONE option for a "completely open smartphone". I've spent the last 4 years in search of just ONE open phone and the closest we've come is the Neo900 (stalled, out of money) the Freerunner (production run of 100?), OsmocomBB running on an ancient candybar (illegal), and this hobby project [1] that is more toy than anything viable.

The Nokia n900 was the last "openish" phone to come out and they stopped making those in 2011 when, guess what, they were bought by Microsoft.

[1] http://www.seeed.cc/rephone/

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#163

Post by arielb1 »

zanny wrote: post #40
elboru wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to resize my browser window in order to read this article in my PC. I don't get this kind of "geeky" designs, is there a technical reason why they don't even add basic CSS? I'm not talking about making the articles look "good", but making them readable.

It is an incredibly modern advent this idea that you can never actually use the entire screen to render text for anyone except for mobile viewers. If you cannot read across your screen, you are probably sitting too close to it. I'd rather have wider text that I have to turn my eyes slightly to see all of then narrower text that requires active scrolling. And I don't know of a single OS that you cannot snap your brows…

200-character-long-lines don't fit in an eye's useful field of view. The problem is that websites have multiple columns of varying fixed width, so that a narrow window will give some websites a tiny actual line-width.

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#164

Post by CydeWeys »

soared wrote: post #155
CydeWeys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a software engineer today because I learned to program in TI-Basic on a TI-82, a calculator which is so inferior to modern smartphones in all ways that that fact needs no further explanation. And yet the TI-82 came built-in with everything you needed to write and run your own programs, on the device. Modern smartphones do not. In that one sense they are significantly less capable than those TI calculators.

> Modern smartphones do not Excluding so many apps and web apps that enable you to write and test code on mobile/tablet? Excluding all the content writing and note taking apps? Excluding 'game builder' apps? I don't agree with your point. Android lets you run android sdk anyways.

Can you link me to some of these apps that let you write code on the phone itself? (Preferably Android, as that's what I have.) I haven't actually used any, and I'm curious.

But the important point is -- the phones don't come with them. The TI-82 literally had a button that you'd press to access programs, and the submenu within was "Run" or "Edit". That discoverability was very important. The kinds of people who would search for and use apps to write programs on the device are the kinds of people like us, who don't need it. (I do all my Android development in Android Studio on a workstation, for obvious reasons.)

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#165

Post by CydeWeys »

msabalau wrote: post #129
ekianjo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphones are just portable computers. There is nothing new to them apart from the fact that 1) they have internet mobile connection 2) their form factor makes them very practical to carry. Technology-wise, we already had about everything when we had laptops and modems attached to them. It's just become much more convenient but it's still the same concept.

Smartphones outsell computers 5 to 1 and for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer. Dismissing them as mere refinement of what went before is to ignore the scale of their impact on the world. One may as well dismiss laptops with modems as "more fully featured telegraphs", or "smaller mainframes".

> for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer.

Smartphones will be their first and last computer. Laptops, let alone desktops, are being permanently bypassed.

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#166

Post by gambler »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #24

I don't really see how some of his points support his position. e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one and it's incredibly useful. Beyond that, it is in ways a production device. It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it…

> Further, smartphones are increasingly becoming production devices, too. They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors and bluetooth keyboards and create a reasonable windows production environment, others have interesting note-taking capabilities.

We're talking about multi-gigahertz quad-core devices with gigabytes or RAM, USB connectivity, Bluetooth, and a high-speed WiFi cards. The fact that they are designed in such a way that connecting them to a keyboard is seen as some kind of achievement is fucking ridiculous. That alone proves the author's point.

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#167

Post by detaro »

CydeWeys wrote: post #164
soared wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern smartphones do not Excluding so many apps and web apps that enable you to write and test code on mobile/tablet? Excluding all the content writing and note taking apps? Excluding 'game builder' apps? I don't agree with your point. Android lets you run android sdk anyways.

Can you link me to some of these apps that let you write code on the phone itself? (Preferably Android, as that's what I have.) I haven't actually used any, and I'm curious. But the important point is -- the phones don't come with them. The TI-82 literally had a button that you'd press to access programs, and the submenu within was "Run" or "Edit". That discoverability was very important. The kinds of people who woul…

IMHO apps like Tasker are an interesting example. They (mostly) work in the app-ecosystem, but people use them to work around limitations in other apps. Especially Tasker is "strong" enough that other app authors offer hooks for Tasker to control the apps.

On the other end of the scale, I have a python interpreter on my android phone (although I don't use it very often)

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#168

Post by wangchow »

Consider that smart phones have only been around for a little more than a decade. It took several decades of development for general-purpose computers to become viable to the mainstream, so the smart-phone technology is just in its infancy.

While the battery consumption issues are definitely a problem, progress is being made to curb them:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/neural-chip-artificial-intelligence...

Really we need innovation in the hardware space in addition to less bloated and more refined APIs. Perhaps more efficient Virtual Machine layers that sit on top of the OS layer. Or even get rid of those entirely and force C++ only, but then the precious security sandbox is gone. In any case, it seems a lot of the OS changes being made are feature-driven more than anything. They are trying to compete on features instead of stabilizing and refining the core. Or, maybe we need a new mobile OS design and some open hardware to support it. Personally, I think BB10 had a lot going for it with QNX and C++ APIs, but because they don't have the precious "apps" consumers demanded it became even more bloated with the sluggish android runtime.

What's more, Device manufacturers push higher-resolution displays and faster CPUs and GPUs--all things that impact battery life. But why not improve upon these gradually while bolstering battery life instead? Consumers won't buy it that's the problem and hardware manufacturers just want to sell units to satisfy shareholders.

The problem is no different than the junk-food industry: consumers don't know what's best for themselves or what they need, yet they develop strong opinions about what they want and companies, hungry for market share meet those demands.

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#169

Post by kayoone »

cableshaft wrote: post #82
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #24

I don't really see how some of his points support his position. e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one and it's incredibly useful. Beyond that, it is in ways a production device. It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it…

Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server. I don't like it. I like having games from decades ago and still being able to play them long after the companies are dead and its employees working on other things. On my own time I try to come up with software that can run entirely without the need to communicate with servers, or even wit…

Imo cloud connected apps are just an inevitable evolution from the technology advancements of recent years. It's just how things are now and will not go away because it has too many benefits, but of course also some downsides.

But tell your argument of independent "non connected" software to administrators who have to manage installations for hundreds of workplaces and they will tell you what a godsend cloud applications are.

I think it will become even more extreme, technologically it would already be possible to have computers or even smartphones be essentially just thin clients, which today is even working for the highest demanding apps like games (eg. Steam Streaming, Playstation network etc). For this to be a reality our network infrastructures have to improve a lot though.

Re: Why I don't like smartphones

#170

Post by thebaer »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #24

I don't really see how some of his points support his position. e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one and it's incredibly useful. Beyond that, it is in ways a production device. It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it…

> it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly

It's not just the fact that it's an underutilized general computing device; just look at the apps on your phone and tell me the percentage of them that open to a blank "canvas" rather than some kind of stream / feed.

On the desktop, you have your text editors, word processors, photo editors, video editors, 3D modelers, IDEs, file sharing utilities, digital audio workstations, etc.

On the phone, you have your camera app and maybe an audio recording app. Everywhere you want to produce something on the smartphone is generally tied to sharing it with others -- but then to share a photo, video, or thought, you're almost always coerced into consuming some information first.

I think this is solvable, though, especially by this community. The mobile platform is still young, especially compared to the desktop world. There is time to create real tools that enable more people to create, and don't simply aim to hold users' stares and profit from their personal information.

Post reply on HN