391–400 of 491 posts
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> Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier Is this really the case anymore? Why would you buy a phone from a third party like that? Most people I know buy their phone direct from Apple or an Android device from Amazon retail.
Most people you know are wealthy then.
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Personally, I just want it for completeness. With phone hardware getting powerful enough to run mid-to-high end games, I want to be able to carry around a phone that I can hook up peripherals to and use it just like I would use a desktop. The Android ecosystem is pretty good in its own way, but it's qualitatively different compared to the Linux ecosystem for my use case. Windows and several popular Linux distros are…
>Personally, I just want it for completeness. You know, that's an interesting point. There's a lot to be said for using one as a desktop. I've got a Motorola Droid laptop thingie around here somewhere that turned a phone into a pc-like device and it was actually pretty cool. A few generations of speed improvements and it would be fine for most uses. It's nice to have a single non-cloud state for your stuff. My main n…
Also, what you're calling complexity, I see as simplicity. In my ideal world, I wouldn't need to install three different versions of a web browser across three devices in order to get through my day.
I spent years working on the Ubuntu phone. It was a fully convergent device: by default it would present a phone UI, but plugin an a keyboard and screen and it presents a full desktop UI. The UI was designed by a team of brilliant professional designers and it was a technical success. Why isn't it around any more? (1) The carriers. Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier, who makes money…
The same shit is happening today, except it's Chrome instead of IE6. We have an entire generation of webdevs who learned fuck-all from the previous round of the browser wars.
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Two things: 1) The GNU utilities have pretty good CLI UI design and there are plenty of us who are perfectly happy with just that and a decent WM like FVWM even on a phone 2) It's not like closed mobile stuff has a great UI either. My favorite example is Apple's camera app. Did you know you can do manual focus with it? It's absolutely impossible to discover but I think it involves a "reverse three finger pinch." I've…
The Apple Camera app has no manual focus. It has autofocus, tap to focus and it has focus lock if you tap and hold. How come your “favorite example” isn’t even a real example...
Sorry I don't use iOS very often (and very rarely use the camera app.)
I think my point still stands though. The UI is not at all discoverable (and not all that ergonomic either which is why most people might tolerate some lack of discoverability.)
I spent years working on the Ubuntu phone. It was a fully convergent device: by default it would present a phone UI, but plugin an a keyboard and screen and it presents a full desktop UI. The UI was designed by a team of brilliant professional designers and it was a technical success. Why isn't it around any more? (1) The carriers. Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier, who makes money…
I really doubt it’s something sinister in enterprise sized logistics. Mainly because the big guys don’t need to be al 90’ies Microsoft about it in the modern world of leaned up Enterprise. The service the big global brands come with do save the carriers a lot of money, but it’s done perfectly legal.
First there is the logistics. As a smaller carrier, you won’t really have to worry about doing BI on sales projections and what not, because Apple, Samsung and so on will simply tell you how many phones you can expect to sell, which is basically how many they’ve already produced for your region. They’ll handle everything from warehousing to shipping to your local stores pretty much without you having to do anything but sign the extremely “take it or leave it” sort of B2B contract, that also includes the big companies not charging you for products that don’t sell. What this translates to is that you can basically run your company without a logistics department or any BI related to the actual phone hardware. This saves you money both on manpower but also on not having too much inventory.
Then there the support side of things. By carrying big well known brands with a very low degree of user freedom for modifications you cut the non-carrier related support you need to offer to almost nothing. You could probably offer good money to get carriers to sell, even a well known brand like the fairphone, and they’d still turn you down because it would cost them too much money to do so.
I spent years working on the Ubuntu phone. It was a fully convergent device: by default it would present a phone UI, but plugin an a keyboard and screen and it presents a full desktop UI. The UI was designed by a team of brilliant professional designers and it was a technical success. Why isn't it around any more? (1) The carriers. Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier, who makes money…
I do feel if canonical were to attempt another crowd-funding attempt at an Ubuntu phone, they might well be successful this time. That phone was a terrific concept. I feel the market has changed since then, with carriers accepting less control over our phones, and the fad of installing every random app has somewhat distilled itself to a smaller number that is widely used.
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>Personally, I just want it for completeness. You know, that's an interesting point. There's a lot to be said for using one as a desktop. I've got a Motorola Droid laptop thingie around here somewhere that turned a phone into a pc-like device and it was actually pretty cool. A few generations of speed improvements and it would be fine for most uses. It's nice to have a single non-cloud state for your stuff. My main n…
That might be a generational thing. I can't remember the last time I ever used my phone as a phone. Also, what you're calling complexity, I see as simplicity. In my ideal world, I wouldn't need to install three different versions of a web browser across three devices in order to get through my day.
I'm sure you're right. I pre-date cell phones and video games and never got interested in either one aside from the technology. A phone seems like a poor substitute to a fast workstation with multiple screens and a keyboard (to me), but I can see the cost in mobile connectivity. Luckily, we can all choose our poison, although my own old man phone needs are not as well supported.
The interesting thing is to consider how your personal technology stack reprograms your thinking.
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I keep wondering why nobody just supersets Android. Even just having an Android phone which is designed to be repairable and have drivers in the kernel tree so it isn't tied to a specific kernel version, people would pay for that. And then on top of it you can add all of your Google-alternative libraries and services, which need not be perfect immediately to get people to use it because they can start off running And…
The mass market does not care about repairable hardware or open drivers. Using niche open SoC will make the device slower and/or more expensive. The mass market cares about price and performance.
The evidence for this is that people didn't refuse to buy the first generation of unrepairable devices. Because nobody told them they were unrepairable until they broke, and by then they already owned it. And by then the unrepairable devices were all you could get.
How many people would buy a phone if you could honestly market it as lasting for ten years instead of three and having a lower repair cost when you drop it on the concrete?
> Using niche open SoC will make the device slower and/or more expensive. The mass market cares about price and performance.
The mass market doesn't care about performance on mobile devices. They can't even tell the difference. It's all marketing. Even the phones that are actually faster on paper aren't faster in practice when the "slower" one still does everything instantaneously.