101–110 of 123 posts
An alternative is that every single phone looks the same. Black or grey square case with a touch screen. There's literally nothing to design or make interesting, just every second model change rounded corners to sharp corners and call it "new design".
I had the first edition Compaq Ipaq pocket pc phone, running on windows. It had a dedicated keyboard and built in 28.8k modem. It was the first 'smart' phone, in that I could somewhat browse the web, but it was mostly useful for email. The modem also functioned as a fax, so I could send and receive faxes, though not all that practical. It didn't have a camera, and was nearly as big as a brick, but it was the first po…
I had a coworker that had one of those, while I had only an IPaq PDA. They were roughly the same size, with the phone being slightly thicker and also an antenna nub on the top. I found my IPaq while moving a month ago. The footprint is significantly smaller than my Google Pixel 6. Though the Pixel is significantly thinner, I find that also makes it more uncomfortable to hold. Like, imagine taking it to an extreme and…
Missing: the Danger Hiptop aka T-Mobile Sidekick, with its swivel-up screen revealing a full keyboard in landscape. https://amp.www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-t... This thing's software is maybe more interesting than its form factor, due to it being a kind of proto-Android stack (Java VM equivalent with some amount of build-time bytecode preprocessing to accelerate it on devices)
Missing: the Danger Hiptop aka T-Mobile Sidekick, with its swivel-up screen revealing a full keyboard in landscape. https://amp.www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-t... This thing's software is maybe more interesting than its form factor, due to it being a kind of proto-Android stack (Java VM equivalent with some amount of build-time bytecode preprocessing to accelerate it on devices)
Danger also had a pretty nice App Store model and a nice developer and user community in their phpBB forums. The carriers that supported the Hiptop also had a hosted web interface where you could manage your email, calendar, notes, etc.
We built a small and simple bartender app that had a UX almost exactly like the hiptop address book. You could easily look up recipes for drinks and then we'd let you build a shopping list. It was a fun exercise that was about a month of development time for the both of us. Mostly, it was just cleaning up the recipe data and adding a few drinks on our own.
It turns out that T-Mobile wouldn't list the app because they didn't have the ability to make sure that everyone using the app was 21+. We fought with this for months over it and eventually gave up. It was a really frustrating experience.
Apple came along with the iPhone and their own store model and while people used to complain heavily about it, I kept thinking at least it wasn't T-Mobile.
By the way, the VM was the precursor to Dalvik, which eventually turned into what is now Android...
https://medium.com/@chrisdesalvo/the-future-that-everyone-fo...
An alternative is that every single phone looks the same. Black or grey square case with a touch screen. There's literally nothing to design or make interesting, just every second model change rounded corners to sharp corners and call it "new design".
I did some investigation around this. At their peak, Nokia launched 46 models a single year [1]. I believe Apple has launched somewhere The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale. [1]: htt…
The genius of Steve Jobs was simply that he had enough taste, vision and authority that the company was actually focused on delivering _products_. The state of the average enterprise, like Microsoft and Google, is that various business units and departments have devolved into cargo culting process to satisfy the petty career needs of their managers and workers. It's not complicated. The people in charge not only do n…
It’s really that simple. People keep forgetting but the iPhone wasn’t the first Apple designed phone. The Motorola Rokr was. And it was a failure because it was an Apple designed Phone.
The iPhone, OTOH, was a computer in your pocket, of which one function was a phone. When the iPhone came out the RIM guys thought it was gonna be a massive failure because it had such terrible battery life and such a terrible typing experience.
But it turned out people didn’t care as much about battery life (also, Apple had gained a lot of experience with optimizing battery life through years of tuning OSX to be able to build the most energy efficient laptops) as they did about the massive screen.
Typing was a poorer experience, but auto-correct was good enough.
The phone guys who spent all their time trying to make longer lasting phones with a better physical keyboard simply could not conceive that those factors might not even be all that important for consumers.
Finally, what really blew up the iPhone was the App Store, and it’s hard to see anyone else doing it, because very few companies had the experience building up a high quality developer platform the way Apple had. Very few other companies had the developer following which would build apps for them despite the massive constraints Apple was imposing on them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end result is often called a "local maximum" and what you've pointed out happens time and time again. Cars underwent something similar very early on, but by the time we got to the "Model T" era it was pretty much determined what they would look like.
After the Model T there was still variety in style and design building on the basic formula... up until the present day when everybody seems to have settled on the same basic bean-shaped blob, specialty vehicles such as sports cars and pickups excepted. Bigger or smaller beans account for body variations from subcompact to crossover, and the name Cadillac, which once conjured images of limo-like luxury, today means a…
Is there a more general framework for understanding when a sudden amount of variation is expected and perhaps rational? The analogy is very loose, but this makes me think a bit of the cambrian explosion, or periods when a sudden environmental shift is followed by a profusion of new species. When a new 'space' is opened, it seems like a range of things can try to fill it, until one strategy becomes dominant, at least…
It is followed by maturity, a feature of which is consolidation (incl reduction in choice and variation as the less profitable options are weeded out).
Until the next disruption...