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

“Smartphone” is the wrong name

loup-vaillant.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 117 posts

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#71

Post by majormajor »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
greggman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did not have any kind of monopoly on cellphones nor did they have one on PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People mostly didn't care. Companies like Sun and Netscape cared…

PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). It's just as much one as the other; let's not forget Symbian? At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure so customers wanted it [citation needed]! People used it because it was preinstalled.

Symbian also came from a PDA OS.

And yeah, Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 was pretty crappy, as was the first Netscape 6/Mozilla stuff for a few years pre-Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#73

Post by mamon »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #44
chroma wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the paragraphs I quoted, the point was basically: If Microsoft had tried what Apple actually did, it would have been a disaster for Microsoft. I think that's accurate regardless of whether they were a monopoly or not. > Also malware infested vs walled garden is a false dichotomy How so? The vast majority of users can't tell if an application is malware. Better for them to put their trust in an authority who can te…

No uneducated user is safe. And I believe malware on smartphones are not unheard of. Short term, sure, give in to the walled garden. Long term though? Learning what a computer is might be a good idea.

Do you decompile every Android app you install? Are you doing anti-malware analysis of their code or binaries? If not then being "educated user" doesn't really help you much. And in iPhone's case Apple is doing that security threat scan for you.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#74

Post by khedoros »

coldtea wrote: post #18
agumonkey wrote: post #5

Not even phones they're not handheld devices anymore. The lack of physical interface is very sad. Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. It's a small slate computer.

> Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. Are you kidding me? All of those functions are 10x easier to do on the "unfit touchscreen" that on what we had before that (tiny non-touch screens, LCDs, 80's style arrays of buttons, etc). And when it comes to actually taking the picture, changing track or volume etc, smartphones even offer…

> Remember trying to get to the 10th track of the 4th folder in your "physical" CD mp3 player or minidisk? Setting anything more advanced than zoom level and picture mode on a typical 2002-2005 compact camera?

I remember putting my music on MP3 players for the last 12 years, having non-MP3 CDs before that, and being able to perform basic operations on them blind and one-handed. I remember using my non-touch camera being much quicker to adjust than the app in my phone, especially when I'm adjusting the more advanced settings.

Touchscreens are optimized for flexibility and portability, and they're great at those. They're terrible at being fit for specific purposes.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#75

Post by dragonwriter »

castell wrote: post #4

Bill Gates called it the "Wallet PC", back in 1994. Later Pen-based computing. Later "Pocket PC".

By 1994, "PC" had already shifted from being platform neutral to referring to the IBM-compatibles with Microsoft OSs. So a name with "PC" in it wasn't likely to stick as the platform-neutral label for the mobile segment.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#76

Post by jdminhbg »

ask5 wrote: post #66

the device is still a phone, because it needs a SIM card to operate. Without it it's pretty much useless. You cant even start the iphone without it, first thing it needs is a sim card.

What? If you boot an iPhone without a SIM it'll show you a warning/error that the SIM is missing, but it still turns on and works.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#78

Post by khedoros »

oxplot wrote: post #40
agumonkey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of the time I need direct blind access to simple functions. Now I have to carefully swipe, carefully otherwise the app goes into gallery mode, or the picture is taken, and since I was pushing on the screen, it's blurry and I need two hands to do so. Side picture buttons are increasingly rare if not defunct, volume rockers are still here though. A lot of things that could be done quickly is now fragile and subtle.…

This can all be "fixed" in software. In fact, on my HTC One M8 which is running Cyanogenmod, if I double press the power button at anytime, it switches to camera app and I can then take photos by pressing either volume buttons. I don't need to (or do) look at the screen let alone interact with it.

How often do you take a picture without needing to set the focus, or at least watching the screen to see when the app has finished its autofocus? More generally, beyond changing the volume or initiating a voice query, how much can you really do without pulling the device out to use the screen? Lack of hardware buttons and tactile feedback can't be fixed in software.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#79

Post by jerf »

tremon wrote: post #47
greggman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did not have any kind of monopoly on cellphones nor did they have one on PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People mostly didn't care. Companies like Sun and Netscape cared…

At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure Meh. IE was the browser with the best website compatibility, because Microsoft went out of its way to reimplement half of the HTML standard in its own way, and could use the prevalence of IE to make webdevelopers follow "their" flavour of HTML. Mozilla's first Firefox release came with the slogan "take back the web". That motto had nothing t…

IE4 was head and shoulders above Netscape 4. IE4 is recognizably a modern browser (by introducing .innerHTML), if a very poor one by modern standards; Netscape 4 was hackery on an engine taken way beyond what it could sustain. Netscape require a long time to catch up, and the helping hand Microsoft gave by slowing down dev on IE round about IE6. There was a long window where IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure and I'm pretty sure it overlapped this lawsuit, though my brain and the calendar don't always get along perfectly.

You can argue that IE was that good due to Microsoft being able to leverage its monopoly to develop something for free they could never have afforded to develop otherwise, since that argument basically won in a court of law give or take some nuances. But, in the meantime, IE really was a better browser for a good long time.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#80

Post by igravious »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #58
api wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Unusual needs like being able to see a lot of text at once, type things longer than a paragraph, multitask, use more than one app in a work flow, and run real software? I doubt it... unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Right now to believe that mobile i…

> I doubt it... unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Already here, its only going to get better. http://bgr.com/2016/02/21/hp-elite-x3-review-pt-1-preview/

Them's are some drool-worthy specs:

http://cdn.bgr.com/2016/02/screen-shot-2016-02-20-at-11-50-3...

Post reply on HN