Why You Can't Build a Smartphone • Hacker News Board

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#81

Post by paulftw » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 1:40 AM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #63

I understand where the author is coming from but I disagree completely. Imagine trying to build a smartphone 15 years ago, that would be really hard. You need a decent screen you need a good cpu etc. All of that is off the shelf now. Anyone can buy it and its cheap. (esp in volume) In a market in China (I dont remember the name) there are vendors upon vendors who sell all sorts of electrical parts, gadgets etc. You c…

Following the same logic we'd have something better than windows8 dominating the market by now. It's so easy to bring a new desktop pc or a laptop to market. Where are new disruptive desktop OSes? Where were they when the market was still growing?

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#82

Post by pgreenwood » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 1:41 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #58

ctdonath wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see how and why a phone can succeed. There is an enormous market for a good dumb phone. Or, well, idiot savant phone: makes calls, makes calls well, and does nothing but makes calls. Between those who just don't want a smartphone, and those who carry enough computing power to not want yet another Cray 2 in a pocket, there's a large niche for a phone that is just a phone, syncs contacts effortlessly, elimi…

I don't really believe this market exists. And even if it does, I expect it's tiny - otherwise, manufacturers would be targeting it.

Last night I had dinner with my parents. They lamented that they could not find a phone for my elderly grandmother. They just need something that just makes and receives calls, is dead simple, has (very) large buttons, and is loud. Where is this phone?

We have an ageing population.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#83

Post by downer93 » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 1:46 AM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #15

I was at UIQ back when the iPhone "happened". It really was as pivotal for the industry as he says. I quipped that the iPhone made us irrelevant and Android made us redundant. I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew any…

  design ascetic

The words are supposed to be "design aesthetic".

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#84

Post by pdenya » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 1:58 AM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #72

mason55 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage. Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price. If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or har…

Samsung made a line called Galaxy Player. The cheapest one was $150 and sported a 3.6in 480x340 pixel screen, at a time when you could get an iPod Touch for $200. There expensive one, the Galaxy Player 5, cost more than Apple's offering. And they all ran Android 2.3 Similarly, there was Archos. They made a whole family of Android player devices at the 2.3 era, and where infamously buggy. Sony made the Walkman Z as a…

I used to think well of Sony but my PS3 has lowered my opinion of them as much as the issues with Sony laptops that family members own. I'd love to see them invest in quality and turn things around but I don't expect them to. It's like they've lost the ability to think through the whole experience so even their nice products have extreme low points.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#85

Post by hoi » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:08 AM UTC

Article is fine but misses a few salient points.

Appstores did exist, Docomo created the first appstore and any phones that were released by the carrier had to comply to Docomo's requirements. Nokia created an appstore with N-Gage, it didn't work and created a carrier backlash.

What Apple did was to stealth in their app store. It was all due to a strategic mistake by AT&T. Sure the Apple was a great device, but remember, the first version was 2G with a crappy camera and an amazing UI/UX and already seen as obsolete in developed 3G markets like Japan (I was working at Nokia in Japan at the time).

AT&T's mistake? Unlike any previous carrier or vendor relationship, AT&T ceded control of software updates to Apple. Apple could update the phone any way they wanted. They already had enough market power in the US that would prevent carrier boycott. At the time, all the carriers were trying to copy Docomo and push out their own appstores, and this decision by AT&T killed it.

In terms of smartphones being a commodity, it already is, anything that sells int he hundreds of millions is effectively commoditized, that doesn't prevent new players from coming in to try and disrupt the market. This is probably the third disruption in mobile phones, from dumbphones -> feature/early smartphones -> current smartphones, however it may be 'too soon' as each cycle has been around for about 10 years each.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#86

Post by salient » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:11 AM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #11

> Challenge: you are now competing with the iPod Touch. It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.

Moto G 2/3 of the price? Nexus 5 for $50 more? It doesn't have to be a "music player" of sorts, when the iPod touch is an iPhone without the phone part. So as long as there are decent Android phones out there with the same specs, that's the alternative. You could buy a Moto G and never use it as a phone if you don't want to.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#87

Post by headgasket » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:27 AM UTC

I disagree. Apple is in a serious lull innovation wise. Google has won the eyeballs of the majority, and their ad business is not an innovation driver. MS is stuck in a deadly dance trying to isolate developers from themselves and/or direct hardware access with their closed source Apis and CLR.

I think firefoxos has a serious chance of pulling a ... Er... Firefox circa 2002 if the threat does not force the hand of their financial supporters.(google)

Thanks to google, there is a ref platform now, it's mostly a software problem; necessity is the mother of invention. With apple blocking anything remotely menacing off their app store(coinbase? Seriously? Who does that?) and android being a boring spying endpoint, cool hardware like the nexus 5 could get an new skin with a cool cloudphone thingamajigger.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#88

Post by Pxtl » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:28 AM UTC

pdenya wrote: post #84

Pxtl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung made a line called Galaxy Player. The cheapest one was $150 and sported a 3.6in 480x340 pixel screen, at a time when you could get an iPod Touch for $200. There expensive one, the Galaxy Player 5, cost more than Apple's offering. And they all ran Android 2.3 Similarly, there was Archos. They made a whole family of Android player devices at the 2.3 era, and where infamously buggy. Sony made the Walkman Z as a…

I used to think well of Sony but my PS3 has lowered my opinion of them as much as the issues with Sony laptops that family members own. I'd love to see them invest in quality and turn things around but I don't expect them to. It's like they've lost the ability to think through the whole experience so even their nice products have extreme low points.

Sony hit a quality nadir 5ish years ago, from what I've heard they've decided recently they can't compete with Samsung and LG at making cheap crap with good components and they're trying to be a quality company again. The Xperia Z hawt secks for example. I haven't touched a PS4 yet or a VitaStation, so I can't speak to their other flagship products.

I'd love to see Sony take on Apple in making quality well-designed equipment and metal laptops. Even if Sony is just as bad as (if not worse than) Apple on IP law.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#89

Post by Pxtl » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:31 AM UTC

Aqwis wrote: post #16

This guy is missing the fact that in a lot of European countries, and elsewhere in the world, carriers mean squat . The carrier is often simply the provider of the SIM card you put in the phone, so carrier support is in no way needed for a phone to succeed. You don't need to be successful in the US to be successful.

Yes, but those are smaller markets.

As much as we're loathe to admit it, the USA represents the largest single market of wealthy (in global terms) customers. That means the USA is the place high-end consumer tech lives or dies. Other markets are more fragmented (so they're more expensive to sell in) or less affluent. There's lots of exciting things happening in Brazil and India, but those are lower-end spin-offs.

I'm a Canadian. Our entire consumer market is based on getting America's sloppy seconds. I have no illusions.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#90

Post by rayiner » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 3:06 AM UTC

natural219 wrote: post #2

Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently). Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that f…

Particular areas of software development rapidly change them plateau. I have an issue of Byte magazine from 1993. It was all about how RISC processors and next generation microkernels were about to take over the market. And yet here we are. Every new phone runs either an OS built in the 1980's (iOS), or a 1990's clone of a 1970's OS (Android). A RISC had a nice little run (ARM), but ancient x86 seems poised to wipe it out just like it did with all its previous competitors.