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Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

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Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#131
post #77

Between this and the Samsung Fold it feels like we have entered into the netbook (form factor) era* void. We're past peak smartphone development and are in this space where manufacturers are stumbling around for the next "it" device but creating nothing that is truly revolutionary. Yes, there are "some" use cases where a larger screen on my mobile device would be useful…. But by-and-large I still want it to fit in my…

> Netbooks were low-powered mobile devices (basically mini laptops) that launched in 2007 and basically disappeared (as a viable market category) after the iPad and its kind were launched in 2010. Chromebooks are very much alive and well.

Kids can't even play Minecraft on our family chromebook without essentially running a different OS.

Chromebooks aren't a panacea.

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#132
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netbooks were low-powered mobile devices (basically mini laptops) that launched in 2007 and basically disappeared (as a viable market category) after the iPad and its kind were launched in 2010. Chromebooks are very much alive and well.

Chromebooks are an US specific phenomenon, hardly seen anywhere else in the world.

They're all over public schools where I live.

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#133
post #77

Between this and the Samsung Fold it feels like we have entered into the netbook (form factor) era* void. We're past peak smartphone development and are in this space where manufacturers are stumbling around for the next "it" device but creating nothing that is truly revolutionary. Yes, there are "some" use cases where a larger screen on my mobile device would be useful…. But by-and-large I still want it to fit in my…

I think the next computing platform gamble is AR.

Facebook is working on building out the tech via VR, but with an eye to AR and generally out in the open.

Apple is building out the underlying software support while working on some AR hardware in secret.

Microsoft has their enterprise hardware, but not sure what they're thinking about otherwise.

Using the phone as a computing device that powers a visual digital AR layer for the real world where you can interact with AR overlays either with thoughts (Neuralink?) or more likely basic gestures (like Oculus' camera tracking, or armbands) would be another revolutionary shift in platform UX and be the big shift away from phone screens.

I'm not sure how possible this hardware currently is or how soon this transition could happen, but people seem to be laying the ground work. Michael Abrash wrote an old blog posts about a couple of reasons why this is hard (primarily drawing black in AR), but he's been at Oculus a while now and I'd be curious how his thoughts have changed.

These foldable phones strike me as a dead end nobody wants.

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#134

I like how on the Duo and larger Neo Microsoft just embraced the fact that foldable OLED isn't ready for prime time yet and instead tried to engineer the seam with as much aesthetic and engineering quality possible.

It is definitely the right approach to the question "how do you engineer a folding display?".

The bigger question is "what do you need a folding display for?"...

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#135
Is the split screen device market a new upcoming segment or is it supposed to be replacing an existing one? I've never thought that I need two iPhones or two iPads connected to one another in a book like fashion like this. Who's the market demographic for this type of product?

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#136

It took almost 30 years since the kernel was released, but Microsoft is officially releasing something with a Linux based operating system. Pretty wild to think about.

WSL2 is already shipping in Beta form in Windows Insider builds and includes a full Linux kernel.

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#138
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the future is less/no screen. Typing on these folding phones seems like a worse experience. Typing at all isn't really natural, and neither is staring at planar, glowing glass. I think the future is conversational computing. I don't own an Alexa/HomePod/etc (yet... maybe some open source on prem thing at some point), but I think that's where the puck is moving. It's just that today their capabilities are some…

Strongly disagree with this. As someone who does own a number of Google Home devices at home and uses Siri on my phone... voice is a terrible interface. For one, there is zero discoverability. I can ask Google today's weather. I can ask tomorrow's weather. I cannot ask yesterday's weather. Leaving aside why that would be (I would find it useful to know that it's X degrees hotter/cooler than yesterday) there's no way…

We definitely agree that voice interfaces are very rudimentary today. I try to run lots of things through dictation first that normally I would type out with my thumbs on the smartphone or on a keyboard on my computer. Text messages, search terms, commit messages, Slack conversations. Still, it can't perform very basic tasks like changing or backspacing a word or phrase, either because it misheard it or because you want to change it. (And actually as I dictated this paragraph on my 2018 MacBook Pro, it typed out everything I said twice and still required typing interventions, and eventually I just fell back to typing everything.)

You've laid out some good criteria though. I wouldn't say voice interfaces have really "made it" until it gets to the point where you don't have to ask how to ask it to do something (discoverability). You just ask it to do something and it does it. Although that's just one of many criteria.

The food menu problem is interesting, but pretty much everything that prints out on a ticket in a kitchen is structured data–it should be able to be efficiently conversationalized (preference notwithstanding, of course). Certainly there are many ways you could talk to someone about a menu: what kinds of dishes are there? Appetizers, grilled entrees, pasta, salads, desserts. What kind of entrees? Vegetarian, pork, beef, seafood. OK, but what styles of cuisine? Jamaican, Italian, Szechuan. There's probably an analog to the 5 Why's for figuring out what someone wants to eat! Asking yesterday's weather, though, is a specific case that could probably be solved by an intern, provided that data is easy to find on the Internet (FWIW, I've searched for the very same thing many times and it's much harder to find vs forecasts).

I concede that there will always be a need for graphical interfaces. How do you "speak" a map, or a CAD model? I guess I was just thinking of things that can accomplished with a keyboard. You can speak anything you can type, even if it's as rudimentary as today, where you have to say "period newline newline" to end a sentence at the end of a paragraph while dictating.

I agree it might seem tough to multitask. But consider WiFi routers serving multiple computers, or hell, even CPUs serving different processes, "simultaneously." If voice recognition and NLP become sufficiently sophisticated I could foresee being able to isolate multiple overlapping voices in an audio sample. If not, consider that you could ask it to look something up, immediately followed by your wife dictating an email to send–or one of you could even interrupt the other–and it could be able to handle the context switching and queuing at speed.

And I understand there's a lot I don't know, and I do remain skeptical that this could ever be perfected. Would it really be able to dictate poetry? Would the forms I create or creatively destroy in free verse just totally confuse the voice interface? Would it be smart enough to side step the confusion via some pseudo-meta-cognitive process and ask me what the hell I'm doing?

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#139

I'm so glad Microsoft is trying again in the Phone space. I wish Amazon would try again, too. It's nice to have choices.

Agreed. There is too little competition in this space. Having more choice would mean there wouldn't be the whole Google Services / Huawei fiasco. Apple and Google are effectively blocking competition in the marketplace.

Re: Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone

#140
post #132
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromebooks are an US specific phenomenon, hardly seen anywhere else in the world.

They're all over public schools where I live.

Those types of educational accounts have been home to Apple (and later Microsoft) in the recent past, all it takes is one school administrator to flip that district to a different solution.

Hence NeXT's focus on educational institutions prior to being bought by Apple.

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