Probably wiped out the gps market also. My map supplier for my phone gave up and I assume it was from trying to compete with google maps. Was a loss for me as the maps worked offline…. “Good enough” and only one thing to remember.
Nailed the pager, voice recorder and related markets as well.
Where X has been things like keyboard, screen, disk drives, modem (now network adapter), speakers, microphone. All were originally separate devices. For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones, but the basic insight that these things just voraciously absorb peripheral and related functions is still just as true.
> For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones
Recently, I've been wondering why the name "phone" has stuck around for a device that has evolved with many more features than that of a telephone. I'm not going to pretend I know a lot about the history of these technologies, but I just find it fascinating that we've kept this identification to something that really provides so many core utilities. I'm curious to know more about the historical implications you alluded to.
Alternatively (and maybe quite a stretch), could I argue that our smartphones are just providing telecommunications to other services, namely, the APIs that they interact with to serve us things like GPS functionality, audio, etc., hence the name "phone"?
Agreed. From a marketing perspective, it makes sense Apple called it a phone. People already had mobile phones on them so you had nothing to lose with the switch. Had they positioned it as a PDA¹ it might’ve been seen as an extra unnecessary device for business people. They’d need to waste effort assuring people it made calls and sent SMS messages so it could be used instead of the phone. An improvement to your current device is an easier sell than a replacement.
Phones connect us to people. Landline, cellphone or smartphone, they connect us. The underlying technology is not as important, nor the additional features.
You use the phone to talk, chat, post, share, get directions to see other people, take photos of people, etc.
It has to do with how nontechnical people perceived things pre-smartphone.
To technical folks, a computer is a device with a CPU that can process data and make decisions based on that data. So smartphones are computers.
To nontechnical folks before the late 2000s, a computer was a device that ran Windows or macOS with a screen and keyboard, and you use it to do spreadsheets, word processing, and such. A phone was a device that connected you to your social world via voice and later text communications. So when smartphones emerged, to nontechnical folks they looked and behaved more like phones -- social connectors -- than like computers, or information crunchers. So they got called phones.
It's like how the ancient Hebrews called whales and dolphins fish, despite those animals being classified as mammals under modern taxonomy. The Hebrews were going by how the animals looked and behaved and how people related to them, rather than genetic inheritance
> they looked and behaved more like phones -- social connectors -- than like computers, or information crunchers. So they got called phones.
They were marketed as a replacement and upgrade for the non-smart mobile phone you already had in your pocket. People had already adopted wireless devices that could make calls, send texts, play games and even access the internet in limited ways and those devices were called phones.
Its always fun to comment on singularity comments sounding like a bot that went of the rails and lost context and does not know how to end a sentence and trys to keep the convertsation going within one sentence to not experience existential dread of dying at the end of a sentence.
I don't think we've fully appreciated yet that "phones" are really the true embodiment of the original Personal Digital Assistant, i.e. an external brain that will augment yours in any circumstance.
Any portable device has been (or will soon be) replaced by "phones".
Yes, I'm constantly referring to my "phone" as my "brain's third hemisphere". It makes people chuckle but no one stops at that joke. It's completely "in the culture".
My late friend Hugh Daniel used to refer to his Bihn's backpack as his "LSD", for "Life Support Device". Like when we were leaving the house he'd shout "Oh no, I forgot my LSD! I'll be right back!" then run back in and fetch his backpack.
But it's okay, because of their multiple-tenancy practices, they only nuked the US offices, and a remote engineer noticed that the CI servers were down. He then drove halfway through the country to crawl through radioactive waste, just so he could plug back in the ethernet cable.
All these VR efforts are anticipating hardware advancements that make AR/VR glasses that are similar in size and form to sunglasses. I can't believe any of these companies (Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, Facebook, et c.) genuinely think that AR on a phone/handheld or big ol' VR goggles are going to take off, especially since both aren't exactly new and both remain very niche—but solve that hardware problem, and those glasses will, 100% for-sure, be the next "smartphone" in terms of changing the role of computing in our lives, and any company not ready for it risks being left behind.
Or maybe it's the other way around - the less people leave home, the more uncomfortable they'll feel outside of it, and the more they'll want some piece of tech to assist them. If you're spending most of your time in a virtual reality where, say, a map can be conjured with a simple gesture, you'd want something approximating that IRL, no?
I'm on the other side. My father used a Garmin GPS in his vehicle for 15+ years.
The phone is a much better experience! Every time he had yet another issue, I wanted to be like "just use your phone!"
- Maps are out of date: Garmin required manual wired updates, Google Maps was always up to date
- Traffic costs: Garmin charged $10/mo for traffic data, Google Maps did it free
- Screen quality: Even in the early 2010's, smartphone screens were bigger and clearer than most car GPS units
- Attraction data: Google's was way more up to date than Garmin's third party attraction data, and Google quickly added multi-stop trips, business hours, busy-level of destination, etc
- Data Entry/voice: Google's voice entry and on screen keyboard were way better than Garmin
I was so happy when he got rid of that GPS and I finally got to stop supporting it.
With car play and android equivalent it’s so much better than a standalone device for navigating.
I do have a garmin watch with offline topographical and trail maps for hiking off the grid but I only use that a few times a year. I could probably get those on a phone too
Organic Maps is a very good and low resource offline mapping app that includes trails, point to point elevation mapping, and very low storage footprint. All built on top of OpenStreetMap. Definitely recommend for camping/travelling etc where you might be out of service for days.
Wiped out most of the pocket-sized handheld gaming market too. Not because phones are better at gaming, but they're "good enough" entertainment with social media, streaming, music, etc.
They do run Linux, so sometimes new games can be made to work on them, like the new TMNT Shredder's Revenge: https://youtu.be/DpVwO8Z8z-E . And some newer devices can run Android for new games there.
I really really wish that apple / google / samsung came out with official hardware game pads that snapped to the phones and had direct support at the os level for game developers to easily support. We're missing out on so many good handheld experiences by being limited to touch only.
USB is good enough for real-time music on iOS and many Android phones. If you want to already snap the controller to the phone, adding a plug isn't much trouble. And some phones still have the 3.5mm jack.
At least the Android version has external USB-C port that could fit an adapter. The specs say only that you can charge through it, it would be nice to know if it's really limited to charging or fully functional.
It is not functional and is power only. Source: I returned mine after being incredibly annoyed by the whole experience because of audio lag. I tried the Razer low-latency earbuds but the latency is still annoyingly high.
I can only imagine the product manager telling HW designers that nobody cares about audio latency, everyone uses Bluetooth anyway and damn this thing must be cheaper and ready for production yesterday.
I'm pretty sure Apple has proper gamepad support for iOS. Remember Made for iPhone? It's needed with their Apple TV that pretty much runs iOS.
But controller support in games is still niche because most people just aren't going to do it. I believe Apple enforces it for their Apple Arcade games, because those have to run on Apple TV too, but outside of that there just isn't much interest.
Did it? The Nintendo Switch sold 114 million units since its release in 2017 [0]. The original Gameboy (a reasonable guess as the most popular handheld gaming device of all time) sold 118 million units [1] in 15 years.
Very different size. You could argue that switch/steamdeck-sized devices have replaced gameboy/ngage/psp-like devices. However, phones seem like the much closer competition -> none of Nintendo, sony or MS even tried to make this form factor anymore
Phones are better at gaming. You can emulate pocket sized handheld gaming devices as well. Perhaps you are only talking about popular games like Candy Crush and the such but there are a lot of heavyweight titles released for mobile platforms as well.
The hardware is obviously better with how often people replace the phones, but ability to target same few interfaces and not have to test on few dozen of phones to make game run well overall leads to better games.
> but there are a lot of heavyweight titles released for mobile platforms as well.
...like ? Every single mobile game that I found "good" usually launched on other platforms too.
I was more talking around the time of the 3ds and Vita release dates. That was about when smartphones started to take off and took out the handheld gaming market. You can see it in the sales, the 3ds did half the lifetime sales of the DS. And then there was the Vita.
Hit the same thing in China. I have free cellular data while there--but at a trickle. Maps were painful and the VPN needed to access Google Maps also added it's own headaches because of the spotty connection causing repeated reconnects.
I don't know, I have more flashlights now that smartphones are available.
Thanks to LEDs, flashlights are now cheaper, brighter and last longer than ever. Even cheap flashlights are better and more convenient than phones at lighting. Because they are cheap and small, you can have one in every place you might need it. And the slightly more expensive ones can be powerful enough as a substitue to mains powered light bulbs for places like garages and storerooms. Also, smartphones don't replace headlamps.
So maybe some people don't get a flashlight because they already have one on their phones, but some people (like me) actually buy more, because they are so cheap and effective.
Adding to this, phones are really awkward and expensive flashlights. I run caseless on my phone and you wont find my phone on me when working on a car if I have someone with me, but you'll find an LED flashlight in my toolbox.
Its a common thing with multitools, lots of uses, not great at any of them.
At the very least drove it into a niche, same as with GPS devices (Garmin still makes devices for triathletes, boats and packs of dogs), and cameras. Flashlights just have to be tacticool now, market's flourishing.
You can still buy alarm clocks too, even though your phone has one, just like it has a flashlight. Cheap alarm clocks are so cheap that only a slight benefit like always having it on your shelf is enough of a reason to buy one. (Expensive ones are decorations and not mainly bought in order to tell time.)
I still prefer a real watch – taking a peek at my wrist is easier than having to dig my phone out of my pocket, flipping open the lid of the case and turning it on. That's true both in summer (just need to lift my wrist) and winter, too (I might have to dig my watch out from underneath my jacket and gloves, but to take out my phone I'd have to take off my gloves, too, so still a more cumbersome procedure.)
Plus lock screen clocks rarely (never?) seem to come with a seconds display (even inside the full clock app I still need to flip a settings switch in order to turn the seconds display on) – while I don't necessarily need actual seconds accuracy that much, knowing whether it is xx:xx:05 or xx:xx:55 certainly does make a difference when I need to catch a train/tram/bus/… and am cutting it fine once again.
Agree alarm clocks are cheap, but there's a very good reason to have one. Single use devices remove another area of phone dependence. Switching from waking up to phone alarm to dedicated clock alarm has been a huge help for me. It allows me to charge my phone in another room and create at least one no-phone zone in the house.
There was a silly horror movie called Crawl that came out a few years back. It's about killer alligators during a hurricane in Florida.
The least-believable part of this very silly movie was that, at the beginning, the main guy in it left his cell phone upstairs when he went to the dark basement to work on something in the house (pipes? I don't remember), which ended up causing the rest of the movie to happen. Of course he'd have taken it with him, for the flashlight if nothing else (and there are lots of other aspects of a smartphone that are super-handy when doing that kind of work).
Think of all the movie storylines that would just completely fail in the era of ubiquitous mobile phones.
Relatedly (sort of), I'm looking forward the day when they stop making movies whose storyline would be destroyed if the protagonist did the obvious thing and pick up the weapon used by their defeated attacker, so that they have a better defense against the next one.
The gps market is alive and well for marine, aviation and outdoor/offroad/motorcycle niche markets.
fwiw, google maps has download & offline functionality. Click your profile icon top right and select the area you want offline. I use it all the time for backcountry hiking (along with OSM apps) and going abroad where I dont have data.
More and more boaters are using tablets & phones as the apps give you access to charts and your instruments (e.g. wind, AIS).
Antennas solutions are increasing to get cellular reception farther offshore that feed into a wifi router.
At anchor, I personally use Organic Maps and drop a pin after I'm properly at anchor. There are specialized "anchor watch" apps but this works for my purposes.
Isn't Google Maps limited to a tiny little 100MB chunk or something? Fine for hiking, less fine for cross country road trips. Here Maps has free offline maps that will let you grab entire countries/continents if you have the space for it.
I enjoy passing the time on airplanes with my phone held up near the window to get a GPS signal, and then look at the names of towns and landscape features far below as I pass them by. It is quite surprising how anything you can see tends to be 10-20 miles off to the side of the plane, until you start paying attention to the quantity of 1 mile cropland squares. Then you truly appreciate how high you are!
This takes 100-300MB per state--I use OsmAnd via F-Droid of course.
I don’t know the limit but it’s larger than 100MB. I currently have about 300MB saved with one chunk (the entire country of Andorra) sitting at 120MB alone.
I dunno if this is as true for Aviation as it was 5 years ago. With Foreflight and the Stratux external GPS/ADS-B in boxes, it's becoming harder and harder to justify in panel GPS for light-sport/hobbyists/GA. I'm willing to bet that in the next 3-5 years we'll see a shift in general aviation to panel mounted "headless" GPSes that communicate with your iPad via GPS and are still coupled to a glass MFD/autopilot, but all the management would be done with an external device.
Google Maps without internet is barely usable. It only has driving directions which is pretty useless if you are on foot or a bike. It's actually astonishing that Google Maps can create an offline navigation plan for a vehicle that weighs thousands of kilos while walking directions always need internet to work.
There's an upper limit on the size of the area (although not their count), so it gets rather tedious if you want to cache a lot. It also expires eventually. with no way to block that.
OsmAnd+ is the only sane option for reliable offline maps w/navigation on smartphones, IMO.
There's a Tom Tom that I've wanted to buy that has a similar motorcycle version. I believe it scores roads but how fun they are, the amount of twists, hills, vistas.
Spying-ad-supported "free" services are suppressing a bunch of markets. Also suppressing open source (why work on a free open source messaging app, say, when none of your friends and family will want to use it since they have 20 "free" options already, funded and promoted with shitloads of ad dollars so you can't hope to have much adoption even with volunteer labor and a "product" that costs $0?)
Here maps was way better than Google (at least in the EU) since it always had offline navigation and would notify you of breaking the speed limit and the presence of speed-cams.
Maybe an OpenStreetMap-based application works well for you. Organic Maps, OsmAnd and Magic Earth have offline car navigation and (I think) warnings for speed traps.
How are the directions on organic maps and magic earth? I tried OsmAnd and it's directions were awful for me.
The first time I used it, was for a drive that Google tells me is 2 hour/100 mile. It initially gave me a route that was 1:58 and 120 miles. I personally don't think driving an extra 20 miles is worth saving 2 minutes so I switched it to most efficient route which worked for that drive.
The next time I used it though was for a drive that should've been 30 minutes/30 miles. It gave me a route that was an hour long on back roads that saved me like a mile of driving. This time, saving a mile of driving isn't worth adding 30 minutes of time for me so I just gave up.
There really needs to be a mode that finds a compromise between route time, route distance, and route complexity instead of just optimizing for one and ignoring the others.
Thanks, I just downloaded it and tried it out with the two previously mentioned routes and it gave reasonable results for both of them. It's also nice that it gives you alternative route options in case you don't like what they chose for you.
I also went ahead and downloaded organic maps just to see how it does in comparison. It also did well on the previously mentioned routes but doesn't give you alternative route options which makes me nervous about it giving a questionable route in other cases. It also takes several seconds to find the route (OsmAnd also took a while iirc) while Magic Earth was nearly instant to give directions. I do like the UI a bit better than Magic Earth (I can't find a way on magic earth to just give me a top down map view that keeps north at the top of the screen which is driving me crazy) but will probably use Magic Earth since it's seems really great in every other way.
- If I'm correct, OrganicMaps (and OsmAnd) calculate the route exclusively on your phone, without calling an external server, that's the reason they are slower than MagicEarth.
- MagicEarth has a 2D view, it's in the Settings. Navigation is always track-up if I'm correct, not north-up.
While Google does not notify of breaking the speed limit, they do have speed limits, red light cameras, user-reported speed traps, debris on road, etc.
Depends on country. In Poland yanosik has a little better routing and MUCH better speed-traps notifications, but no offline maps. There was auto-mapa here which had even better routing and was fully offline, but was not free, it's almost dying now.
Oh I miss here maps. It was great when traveling. Would download the map for the country before flying and didn’t need to buy data and could still search for addresses.
OrganicMaps works well. I travel to Andorra frequently, and because they are not in the EU it’s not free to roam there. Organic maps allows you download the entire country at a time and navigation and searching all work without data. I use it quite a bit in the mountains even in countries I have data in. Since it’s just OSM data it has a decent selection of hiking trails and whatnot, too.
I was pleasantly surprised how polished it is (on iOS at least). I had only ever tried OSM AND before it and this is leagues ahead in terms of usability. It’s more or less as good as Google Maps or Apple Maps, short of real time traffic updates. It’s navigation routing is not quite as advanced either, but it does the trick in a pinch (I don’t use it much in the car but more for searching and hiking trails)
When I moved from Lumia to iPhone > Android. Here maps was different. It didn’t feel the same as on the Lumia. So I just flick between Google maps and Apple Maps now. But miss the here maps from Lumia days.
I don't understand why showing speed-cams would be illegal. In Poland all speed-traps are clearly marked with a sign at least 100m before, so that when someone overspeeds, he doesn't suddenly break when he sees speed trap (which caused more accidents than overspeeding).
The British Automobile Association (AA) used to have a network of operatives on bikes (cycle scouts) who would salute members displaying the AA badge if they were approaching a police speed check.
This warning activity was tested in court and found to be illegal, as interference with the police undertaking their duties. Their response to the judgement was to switch the warning method to NOT saluting members if they're approaching a speed trap because apparently they couldn't be found culpable for inaction. So they would only salute members if the coast was clear. A bit like a warrant canary.
In Poland people used to blink their high beams when there was speed check ahead, it's sometimes still practiced (illegal then and now, but not because you warn of police, it's classified as "misuse of lights").
What happen, at least in Italy, is that are speed cam warnings everywhere, but of course only a tiny percentage at any time will have an actual speed camera.
It kind of works as deterrent, although I expect that the effect wears off after a while.
Some people do, but you can easily put speed cameras where there are some accidents. It's more honest that way in my opinion. I've driven in Germany and their cameras don't make me go much slower, just annoy:
- A series of 80-60 speed changes on straight road, then just when you are annoyed and don't slow, there is a speed trap.
- Badly marked school zone, I was doing 40km/h already, then a black painted camera hidden in bushes caught me.
We have those in Poland too, that's how I got my first speeding ticket. three lanes each way 80, 80 80, crossing with 60 and camera (there wasn't even any pedestrian crossing there too.
Because the purpose of police cars and and speed cameras, is ostensibly to make you slow down to the speed limit. Marking these on your map, makes you slow down.
This probably varies country by country, depending on whether it's a money-making exercise (where the police try to hide) or safety (where cameras are painted bright yellow and the police are clearly visible)
...this also varies by country: in some countries, the speed limit itself, not the camera, is there for your safety - I mean, how many cameras should they install?! In others, they exaggerate the speed limit, e.g. 50 km/h on a straight road outside of built-up areas, hoping that drivers will at least slow down to 80 km/h (looking at you, Italy!).
I guess the future of speed traps is "section control", e.g. install cameras at beginning and end of a speed-restricted stretch, and if the time you needed is significantly below the expected one with legal speed, you get a ticket.
> I guess the future of speed traps is "section control", e.g. install cameras at beginning and end of a speed-restricted stretch, and if the time you needed is significantly below the expected one with legal speed, you get a ticket.
This has been common in Western Europe for decades now.
Anywhere with electronic tolls already has this. It would be trivial for politicians to hit everyone with a speeding ticket on a tolled highway if average speed between two tolls is more than legal limit.
I didn't show police cars. It just showed fixed speed cams which is legal in the EU as even the radio stations announce the location of currently active speed cams via traffic information.
It's legal in some of the EU - to the best of my knowledge, it's illegal in Germany to have apps tell you about speed cameras/etc (you can have the app, you just can't use that bit of it).
That is a matter pf national law, not EU law. In Germany for example the radio announcements are legal but devices and navigation systems that warn of them are not.
If you are on Android I can recommend either Maps.me with great 3D view or Maps.cz for great tourist trails, Google Maps content is horrible in Europe. Of course any decent app can download offline maps for whole countries and not some GMaps parody with small section of map.
Nailed the pager, voice recorder and related markets as well.