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Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

joshondesign.com

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Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#101

Post by TillE »

salient wrote: post #86
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.

How's the headphone jack on those devices? I've had terrible experiences with Android devices in that respect, including the Galaxy Nexus. Unusable in a matter of weeks, whereas my iPods have always had rock solid connections even after years of abuse.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#102

Post by e12e »

gnaffle wrote: post #65
untog wrote: post #64

Curious that the article doesn't mention the word "patents" once. That's what stops you from even starting to build a Smartphone of your own - you'd violate dozens of patents and be sued into oblivion. The only reason manufacturers are able to do it now is because they all have portfolios of their own and are in a state of cold war with everyone else.

Most things needed to make a smartphone is covered by FRAND patents. Software patents are of course a problem for anyone working in the software industry, so that's not limited to smartphones.

"Most things"? Haven't we just learned that if you make a smart phone that looks like a smart phone (rounded rectangle, button below screen) you can (and will) be sued?

I suppose the fact that stuff like that is the area where big legal battles are fought, does imply that a lot of the "hard" patents (radio spectrum/coding, noise cancellation, audio encoding etc) are indeed covered by FRAND patents, though. It still seems to be a bit of a leap to go from there to saying that you'd not run into patents when making a smart phone?

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#103

Post by kllrnohj »

salient wrote: post #86
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.

You are a bit mistaken on the price differences. The 16GB iPod Touch is $230. The 16GB Moto G is $200 and the 16GB Nexus 5 is $350. The $300 iPod Touch is 32GB, which is $100 less than the equivalent storage size N5 (and there stops being a Moto G at this point). So if you have an extra $100 you could get an N5 instead of an iPod Touch - or you could spend that extra $100 to get a 64GB iPod touch.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#104

Post by EdwardDiego »

paulftw wrote: post #79
girvo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these articles do. It's annoying.

Every european country has own laws, culture and language. They are individual markets, and each market is too small to break even after all the R&D and hardware costs.

> Every european country has own laws, culture and language.

You're completely disregarding the EEC and European Parliament. As an aside on language, while on the train to Brussels from Köln, I was chatting with some Young Greens who were en route to a pan-European Green conference. One was from Serbia, one from Germany and one from France, and we were all speaking in English, it tends to function as a lingua franca, so language has never been a barrier for me yet. The multilingual capacity of Europeans really puts me to shame, my German barely goes past "I would like a beer" and "I would like a coffee".

But yes, they have different languages, so i18n is a thing you have to pay attention to, and yes, they have different cultures and markets, so how you sell and engage people can differ. But you can recruit a small cadre of local sales experts to do your sales - a sister company of ours develops in the Czech Republic and sells in Poland, Romania and Turkey. The European market is hardly as balkanized as you make out.

If what you say was true, then iPhones would have presumably never impacted in Europe - after all, every european country has own laws, culture and language.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#105

Post by ewzimm »

ac29 wrote: post #52
fingerprinter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's this type of comment that really disappoints me about HN these days. Ubuntu just released V1 of their phone in October. Anyone who knows phone manufacturers and carriers knows how long they soak something in their labs. Ubuntu has all the pieces in place to be an awesome option. Plus, they have their carrier advisory group with some great names showing their is some carrier interest. Ubuntu has a company behind…

Canonical released a phone in October? I think you're mistaken.

Canonical released v1 of their phone OS for developers in October.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#106

Post by ewzimm »

dllthomas wrote: post #95
gwu78 wrote: post #93

I don't want a "smartphone". I want a handheld computer, the size of a "smartphone", with a cool form factor like a "smartphone". But, it needs to have Ethernet ports, USB ports, SD card slots, CF card slot, etc. An RS232 serial port would be nice too. I want versatility: inputs and outputs. I do not need to connect to any cellular networks. I do not want a closed source baseband operating system, SIM cards, etc. I w…

I want a handheld terminal for a belt-mounted computer. A belt can easily support quite a bit more battery, for hard core computation, longer-range transmitting, and GPS.

A belt with integrated batteries throughout and a micro USB cable would be so useful, and the batteries could easily be integrated fashionably. I don't know why anyone doesn't make that. You could charge your phone in your pocket

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#107

Post by enscr »

I agree you can't just build a smartphone. Heck, even building a dumb phone from scratch is a monumental task, let alone being successful with it. What was Apple thinking... Oh wait, they redefined the rules of the game. So that's what you do to shut up the naysayers.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#108

Post by Tuna-Fish »

e12e wrote: post #102
gnaffle wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most things needed to make a smartphone is covered by FRAND patents. Software patents are of course a problem for anyone working in the software industry, so that's not limited to smartphones.

"Most things"? Haven't we just learned that if you make a smart phone that looks like a smart phone (rounded rectangle, button below screen) you can (and will) be sued? I suppose the fact that stuff like that is the area where big legal battles are fought, does imply that a lot of the "hard" patents (radio spectrum/coding, noise cancellation, audio encoding etc) are indeed covered by FRAND patents, though. It still s…

> "Most things"? Haven't we just learned that if you make a smart phone that looks like a smart phone (rounded rectangle, button below screen) you can (and will) be sued?

Only if you sell in the markets where such patents matter. Note how Jolla is conspicuously absent from the US.

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#109

Post by hooctawnfonix »

This is an interesting perspective but it also fails to imagine a shift in paradigm. The way I see it and the way the article acknowledges it to some extent, you can't build a new smartphone with the existing paradigm where carriers have control. What happens if the communication infrastructure that they control gets disrupted is anybody's guess. But maybe by then what we call a smartphone isn't called a smartphone anymore...

Re: Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

#110

Post by bitkrieg »

rayiner wrote: post #90
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 i…

Modern "x86-based" CPUs are actually mostly RISC architectures under the Hood. Instruction sets are a mere front-end nowadays and don't tell much about the inner workings. Think of bytecode.
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