Absolutely warranted, but there is no reason to worry, apps will keep up with the performance development and in a blink of an eye you will be forced (security, security security!!) to upgrade to the new versions of phone app or photo app dragging in 'free' and top notch AI assisted VR capabilities or whatnot that require power beyond current levels. Do you need that feature? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, you will have it. Rumours say MS is working on some sort of AR into Teams, which is just a random example of trigering "... but why?" Ryan Reynolds meme look. Wasting of resources is always a good reason for pushing up the performance ceiling.
I almost never install an app unless absolutely required to either, but you talk as if web apps weren't some of the worst offenders in the matter of performance wasted.
Perhaps if they weren't gluing together unaudited components, with a programming language designed to obsolete the blink tag, using the most expensive laptop on the planet they'd be less profligate with a users resources.
</warning>
Things are no better in the game industry and the days of Avie requiring engineers to develop on hardware more representative of users machines are long gone.
These limits are not immutable, web standards grow by the day, keeping up with the performance development as much as the apps themselves. There's already WebGPU, so 3D graphics already is a thing on the web. Also, case in point, the built-in CSS filter effects get pretty taxing on not-too-old mobile hardware, as I've lamented yesterday [1].
I never understood why one app has to cover everything. Apps are bloatware today. Same goes for Windows. All I wanted worked on 98SE or XP. How did OS get from 1GB to 30GB for listening music, surfing, some office, watching pictures? Ah yes, teams, onedrive, defender, firewall (I have my own hardware why do I need this forced) and other cloud integration no one asked for and if they ever forced only online account, that's where I draw the line with MS and I'm sure they will do it soon. They badly need and want our data.
I asked for it. A lot less time spent doing tech support when backing up and restoring a device is as simple as logging into an iCloud account.
Obviously, it shouldn’t be mandatory, but the ease of use surely benefits the majority of the population. Having to reinstall the operating system every now and then was not tenable.
But I mean ease of use, overall. Before, you have issues with your computing device, you have to troubleshoot how to get data off of it, transfer it, possible avoid malware, maybe have to pay someone to help you.
Now, you set it to backup to iCloud, and if something happens to the hardware you buy a new device and login, and you’re good to go. Or if it’s software, you might have to reinstall (I never have had to).
It's funny, as my phone (A 2022 Moto Razr) can work as PC, if I plug it into a monitor with it's USB-C port. I can plug it into a monitor, and plug a mouse and keyboard into the monitor's inbuilt USB-C hub, and it works just fine. Has a desktop mode and everything! If the monitor doesn't have a hub in it, I can use the phone as a mouse/touchpad! Plus, if the monitor supports it, it'll even keep it charged rather than using the battery!
And I don't just use it as a gimmick, I use a HDMI/USB-C cable to use it with my TV as a streaming/light gaming setup. Nice to be able to plug it in, kick off a streaming app or Youtube, or play some Minecraft or something on my TV in bed, all comfy.
Can confirm, S22 ultra when plugged into Dell docking box (or whatever its called, not a typical docking station, it just connects with laptop via thick USB-C cable) works out of box, with mouse and keyboard.
Firefox with ublock origin works very well for example. The only thing is it doesn't adjust automatically to native screen resolution (1600p in my case). But its still just an Android, even with full filesystem access it feels vastly subpar to normal desktop PC if I need more than just browsing or other android apps.
My dream was to be able to use VR glasses and something like Samsung dex for an ultra portable coding workstation.
I bought a pair of Viture Pro glasses, but they were pretty unusable for coding for me. Maybe for watching videos would have been OK but not typing / needing to read all areas of the screen.
Boy do I have some bad news for you: Automated Content Recognition [0, 1, 2]. If your Smart TV is connected to the Internet, it can also track what you're watching or doing, even if you're using it as an external monitor [3] (in Dutch).
TL;DR: I'm of the opinion that the answer is probably "not yet", "it's in the works", or "it's already here, but not yet widely known".
In short, I couldn't find strong conclusive evidence for "yes" or "no".
The Wikipedia article on ACR [0] seems to be quoting CIO-Wiki [1] --- or vice-versa. The statement would imply "yes":
> Real-time audience measurement metrics are now achievable by applying ACR technology into smart TVs, set top boxes and mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. This measurement data is essential to quantify audience consumption to set advertising pricing policies.
On the other hand, a paper on ACR [2] implies it only occurs on TV's (so, this points us towards "no"):
> [...] Unlike traditional online tracking in the web and mobile ecosystems that is typically implemented by third-party libraries/SDKs included in websites/apps, ACR is typically directly integrated in the smart TV’s operating system. [...]
... but then, in its conclusion one could make the case for "not yet" as they reference Microsoft's Recall (this, to me, makes me lean on "not yet"):
> [...] Finally, although different than ACR, our auditing approach can be adopted to assess privacy risks of Recall (Microsoft, 2024) – which analyzes snapshots of the screen using generative AI (Warren, 2024). [...]
Collecting my thoughts on this paper, I'm a bit disappointed that we seem to have a double-standard for the nomenclature: if the content recognition happens on a PC, then it's labeled as "generative AI" (should've probably been called LLM by the authors) and if it takes place on a TV-shaped computer (they're mostly Android TV's, after all, right?) then it's called ACR. I think that it has not been properly articulated that what people are worried about [3] is that Microsoft's Windows Recall is (or will become) "ACR with extra steps".
To conclude (and extend this to the mobile phone domain), I'll leave a "thought experiment": is all the AI processing power on new mobile phones going to be used exclusively by the users, and for the users?
-----
Some nuanced notes...
I'm conflicted about whether to demonize ACR entirely or not. To me, "ACR" means something that is running all the time listening to user's surroundings or screenshotting a user's displayed information for the purposes of improving targeting or tracking their behavior (this seems to match Wikipedia's definition at first glance). I am in part validated by [2] as well:
> [...] At a high level, ACR works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV’s screen and matching it against a content library to detect the content being viewed on the TV. It is essentially a Shazam-like technology for audio/video content on the smart TV (Mohamed Al Elew, 2023).
However, after doing some research, I discovered that a particular knowledge field may be misusing the term (or using the ACR term for lack of a better term like "reverse image search" or "content-based image retrieval" --- CBIR, CBVIR, QBIC --- in their vocabulary), and perhaps in the process inadvertently "whitewashing" the term.
Take, for example, the European Union's Intellectual Property Office's (EUIPO's) discussion paper titled "Automated Content Recognition: Discussion Paper – Phase 2 ‘IP enforcement and management use cases’" [4] (PDF). I think that they are conflating some terms like hashing, fingerprinting, watermarking and labeling it under the ACR term, then they're making valid-sounding use-cases like "smartphone solutions to detect genuine or counterfeit products" (products, by definition, are not content,... so I fail to see how ACR ties in). Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm misreading the paper (I am no IP lawyer, but have worked as an Information Security Officer).
I think the EUIPO paper also glosses over some possible privacy implications: e.g., they link to an article called "Are 3D printed watermarks a “grave and growing” threat to people’s privacy?" [5], but in the context of using "RFID tags or serial numbers" to protect IP on 3D printed objects ... they do not discuss the possible privacy implications of, for example, being tracked by a possible "RFID-tag-cloud" of such objects. I know that this is beyond the scope of "is there ACR running on mobile phones", but I wanted to showcase what I think is the misuse of the ACR term to expand into the physical --- "offline" --- world, in the process losing its more "academic" meaning.
To answer your question directly: I'm pointing out unexpected privacy pitfalls of using a smart TV's full set of features (i.e. running apps and using it ... as a monitor).
Although I agree with the point of your solution... I disagree with minimizing the danger of such anti-features.
To elaborate, try thinking of your average reasonable person and think of their journey into learning how to preserve their privacy without losing access to the features of the services and products they have paid for. Without a massive effort it is ultimately an oxymoron.
A reasonable person would expect that your (internet connected) smart TV would collect info to help them tailor future products based on their customer's usage (app usage frequency, standard or cable usage frequency, frequency of usage as external monitor). You would not expect to have to watch what you say in front of the such a device because they're literally listening to you [0] (in 2015, you needed to use the remote to use the voice detection service).
Additionally, reasonable user's of smart TV's (and other IoT devices) might feel like they are no longer tracked with their uniquely identifiable information because they turned off "targeted advertising" (if the service allows for setting that option), but that only prevents their advertising ID from being tracked [1].
Moreover, a reasonable person might expect that using a DNS-based blocklist would be a sort of "revocation of consent" to being tracked, but tracking services are savvy when it comes to PII exfiltration [2]:
> [...] We find that personally identifiable information (PII) is exfiltrated to platform-related Internet endpoints and third parties, and that blocklists are generally better at preventing exposure of PII to third parties than to platform-related endpoints. [...]
Finally, there have also been studies that show a lack of transparency when it comes to GDPR requests about the data collected through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) [3].
So, my point is that "just don't use your product for most of its intended use" might be a thought-terminating cliche that prevents us from taking a step forward in stopping the normalization of unreasonable privacy transgressions (PII exfiltration, audio spying by third-party service providers, monitoring of external devices' screens).
I meant the Z Flip 6. Not the fold. The folds have always had fully supported DeX.
The Flips did not have a DP-capable USB-C port until the Flip 5, and still did not support DeX due to thermals. But the Flip 6 has it with a developer option, but only the "new" DeX.
Sorry for the confusion on my side. I thought of the Flip as the OP mentioned the Motorola Razr which is positioned against that, not the Fold.
Not great) Tried replacing my laptop with a Samsung phone+monitor combination on a trip, didn't really work out. Phones are not built for continuous load.
The official DeX docks have a fan built in. This helps a lot especially if you take the phone out of the case. I need to do so anyway because the usb doesn't go in deep enough without it.
I had a Huawei P20 Pro that did much the same back in 2018.
I never really used it for much, a bit of light browsing and really just as a gimmick, buit yeah, there was a desktop of sorts and you could use all the apps, and the touchpad/mouse thing worked. You could attach a bluetooth keyboard too, IIRC.
Kindof a shame my iphone doesn't do this (I assume, I haven't tried), but I'm not sure if I'd use it.
Actually, I use my iPhone with a USB-C/HDMI cable, the Remote Desktop client and a Bluetooth keyboard when traveling. Some apps will let you use an additional display just fine.
OK so I've now tried this with a new USB-C iphone.
Yeah it's painful to use! You can set up a mouse, and use a physical keyboard for input, but it doesn't attempt to do any more than mirror the screen onto the external device by default.
Huawei's desktop mode was limited, but I think you're right - you can say the iphone has good device compatibility, but there's not a good way to use it docked. Not that the android ones were 'good', but they made an attempt!
Which is quite frankly weird, given that the iPad has fairly robust mouse/keyboard support at this point, and at least some nods towards window management
Interesting, I wouldn't mind an Android phone that can do similar, but I'm not looking for a clamshell. For anyone else who, like me, is naive about such things, the key search terms seem to be: DisplayPort alternate mode over USB-C. Support seems patchy.
I hate USB-C for laptop charging ports, to fragile for regular use. However I build a few things recently and I love the simplicity.
- External Touch Screen - only needs one cable, usbc, for picture, sound, touch, power! ... (DP mode you mentioned required)
- As power source. My caravan computer (Dell wyse 5070) uses usbc as power source with a cheap DC slot adapter. My laptop charges in usb-c from 60w or more.
- We have 2 Rolands (p-1, s-1) both can use their usbc cable for direct audio in AND out which just works on Linux.
- For the Roland's I can use my phone as sound DAW or source, or both. I can also attach the touch screen, ...
All using the same (cheap and available) cable. Which is amazing and took my whole life to get to.
I find it highly annoying that these rather powerful handheld smartphone computers don't have decent port access for use with instrumentation, etc.
A huge range of features comes to mind from Geiger counters, oscilloscopes, sound level measurement, light intensity, etc , etc. The potential to expand the smartphone capability is enormous yet no manufacturer has tackled it. Why not?
Why aren't there multiple USB ports? By now why don't all phones use USB-3? Why isn't there general purpose D/A and A/D ports/outputs for instrumentation? Why don't they include a GPIB-like bus to connect to things? Why can't we use the screen as an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of say 100MHz?
Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).
I find it amazing that no smartphone manufacturer has
branched out into this field. Such potential and no one is servicing it. Phone manufacturers are missing out by not servicing this scientific/techie measurement market.
Why, say, doesn't Fairphone provide a range of interchangeable ports/modules that can changed for different functions, to add additional sensors, etc.?
> Why aren't there multiple USB ports? By now why don't all phones use USB-3? Why isn't there general purpose D/A and A/D ports/outputs for instrumentation? Why don't they include a GPIB-like bus to connect to things? Why can't we use the screen as an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of say 100MHz?
Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0. There do exist phones with multiple USB ports, and there do exist plenty of USB3 capable phones. Instrumentation and measurement is an extremely specialized field, and the number of people that would maybe find use out of it would quickly switch to a more useful interface for something like an oscilloscope.
For your general purpose adc and dac, they already make one: it’s called a usb-c audio adapter.
Also, there is a small market for people who don't want a laptop. Or a Raspberry Pi. I bet a Pi with display would make a better if slightly larger.
It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub. It used to be they were all USB-C to USB-A but there are starting to USB-C only hubs.
"It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub"
First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated.
Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.
Frankly, is this is a first-class fucking nuisance. Why can't I have direct compatibility with my PCs and laptops?
To get my phones to do what I want I have to root them and even this isn't fully satisfactory. Rooting is a pain and takes a lot of time to do it correctly and I'd prefer not to do it
With OTC there is no consistency across phone manufacturers. Why the hell not?
Also, why are phone manufacturers removing micro SD slots from phones?
More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?
Now if I go to that despised Chinese company Huawei I can get NTFS support by default (on OTG at least). That Huawei can offer NTFS as a standard feature and most others do not tells me a lot about the oligopoly-like smartphone market.
People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.
There's been fuck-all worthwhile innovation in recent years.
> First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated.
First, multiple USB ports are bulky, and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about. I don't need an extra port for the majority of my uses.
> Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.
The timeouts are for idle time. If you have a long period of idle time, you aren't using the device... which consumes power from your tiny phone battery. It's very reasonable for the uses most people use them for. I'd agree it would be nice to have the ability to disable the timeout, but I can't speak to what every phone manufacturer is doing.
> More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?
What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways.
> People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.
And what exactly is wrong with that? Laptops also haven't had "innovation" in the sense you're describing in years either. They serve their purpose, do what they do well, and get marginally better year over year. It's fine.
"What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways."
One of the reasons why my reply is late is because of exFAT problems. Right, I don't expect you to believe that but it's true—see my comment at the end.
exFAT may have better compatibility but it's about the worst file system ever invented. Have you ever thought why Microsoft made it freely available and not NTFS? Yes, everyone believes the MS mantra that exFAT uses fewer resources than NTFS and that's true but it seems few are aware about how diabolical this file system actually is and the high potential it has for losing one's data.
Why? Well it has only one FAT table and not two, clobber that and one is stuffed big-time—and often many people lose data this way.
Why would Microsoft eliminate the second backup FAT table in exFAT when it was proven so valuable in earlier versions of FAT—especially given exFAT's higher capacity where the loss of data would be even more disastrous? (Even Blind Freddy ought to be able to see the necessity of having a second FAT to protect one's data.)
Let me give you an example: about 12 months ago I was transferring some data stored on my smartphone's 512GB microSD card to my PC when I lost about 231GB of data! That's no small loss and I've still not recovered it.
You may well ask how that happened. Simple, the SD was removed from the phone and placed in the PC's USB slot to move a small percentage of files to the PC. Unfortunately, I removed the SD before the write process had completed and it clobbered the FAT and everything was deleted, the card was not only devoid of all files but also according to Windows it was now unformatted.
OK, so it was my fault, that I accept—doubly so because I didn't follow the golden rule of copying everything first before deleting the source files (although in this case that wouldn't have saved the files that I'd not moved).
I tried the usual unearase utilities/procedures and only recovered shrapnel. Of course, what else would one expect when file systems don't store files in contiguous sectors. This is yet another antiquated idea where data integrity is traded for speed without adequate fallback/safety protections.
You probably are asking why I removed the SD from the phone instead of transferring the data by OTG. That's easily explained too, OTG on phones is inordinately slow except for the very few that use USB3—not to mention the fact that Android (especially so since v10) won't allow one to copy data from say the Android directory. (In this instance, even though I wasn't copying all the files there were enough to make removing the SD to provide a worthwhile saving in time (it had over 300k files stored on it).)
Fortunately, most of the files were already backed up so only a small incremental amount of nonessential data was lost and I've put the SD aside until I get around to mirroring it in case I ever want to recover them. Incidentally, this isn't the only time I've killed an exFAT's table but it's the only time I've lost data (other times the data was already backed up). I'm not alone I could tell stories of others who I know personally who've lost data in similar circumstances.
I've experimented with exFAT both on SD cards and SSDs and have come to the conclusion that if one wants to kill all data on such a dive quickly without secure delete so it looks like a new drive then all one has to do is to disconnect it during a write operation. It's that catastrophic.
Now comparing exFAT with NTFS is like chalk and cheese. If I'd been using NTFS then none of that would have happened. NTFS is a proper journaling file system with good inbuilt protections, it's hardy and will take much abuse before significant data is lost. Moreover, the argument that NTFS uses large resources and overhead is now mute—we're long past the days of floppy disks and pissy little processors.
If you think I'm whingeing about this without due reason then I'd suggest you ask yourself why some USB thumb drive manufacturers pre-format large capacity drives (>32GB) in FAT32 when Microsoft limits FAT32 formatting to only 32GB in Windows. Good question. I'd suggest they're well aware of the dangers of exFAT and how easy it is to lose data when using it. The answer is obviously an economic one—they want to minimize customers returning drives after losing data and or not wishing to develop a reputation for having flaky drives.
Now ask yourself why does Microsoft force users who format drives larger than 32GB to exclude using FAT32 and use either exFAT or NTFS yet still provide Windows with the facility of reading FAT32 drives with much larger capacity.
Also the question remains why Android doesn't automatically support NTFS, especially so nowadays given that the Paragon NTFS file driver is an integral part of Linux. There are multiple reasons for this some of which are known publicly, others we can only speculate about. Similarly, the reason why many manufacturers have removed SD cards from phones but that's a separate matter too big to address here except to say their excuses are so weak they're just pathetic.
One fact remains certain, none of the big manufacturers gives a damn about integrity of users' data despite all the palaver and noise over security, hackers stealing data etc. If they did then they'd be just as concerned with data entropy† no matter what its source—but they aren't. I could say much more but this post is already long enough.
BTW, my Huawei phone (which I no longer have as I'd dropped it and broke the screen) was very handy. It still used exFAT for its SD card but its OTG supported NTFS by default. Moreover, it used an excellent NTFS driver in that even on USB-2 files could be copied very quickly to an external drive. To transfer files to my PC I used to couple a 1TB NTFS-formatted SSD via OTG and it worked perfectly (also OTG provided enough power to run the SSD without effort).
It's little wonder so many were pissed off with the restrictions over Huawei as the company's products work extremely well. It's a shame other manufacturers don't follow suit.
Finally, this reply is late because my phone's SD (a 512GB Samsung SDXC Pro) could not be read after I'd done multiple file transfers from internal memory to the SD (aftwewards the SD couldn't even be seen). The problem occurred almost the same time as your post.
Fearing the worst I immediately shut the phone down and moved the SD to the PC where I found the card and its files 100% OK. I then wasted considerable time copying the files to the PC because many files exceeded the 260 file/path-length limit in Windows. Right, another ridiculous historical artifact that Microsoft and others have not yet fixed (same goes for the ongoing limitation with reserved characters, why can't we use say a '?' in filenames when clearly it's possible?).
Why so many users simply accept this unacceptably shitty and ergonomically terrible tech without complaint just beats me.
Clearly, you're one who is actually satisfied with your tech.
† Same goes for the unacceptable and irresponsible way Microsoft has implemented the SSD Trim function in Windows. If it isn't obvious I will provide an explanation.
There's fantastically few phones with multiple USB ports. Some of the Lenovo Legion gaming handhelds are the only ones I can think of.
But we are seeing some signs this might change. And insure hope it does, in a big way. A hub can be ok, but with the need to mix display out & peripherals and power, in fancy ways, USB3 really is a limited option. And alas USB4 fixes many of the constraints but is way too high end alas alas alas. Anyways here's an upcoming very cheap tablet with multiple ports, and reports are a lot more are coming. Given the marginal cost of ports, it's about frelling time! Do it! You won't ever have adoption if there's no (or almost no) option! https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-tablet-has-a-genius-featu...
Can you access the ADC in a non-audio context? If not then it's dedicated to audio. The Square reader is like a telephone modem, presumably some app then listens to the "microphone"?
A small correction here: 90%+ of audio I/O ports aren't general-purpose. This is because there are almost always DC-blocker circuits on each output, commonly a series capacitor. With very few exceptions, you can't use your soundcard to provide an accurate DC output such as a control voltage.
"Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0."
How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement.
Moreover, this article alone has raised the matter of additional features.
Anyway, it's only a matter of time until some (likely small) manufacturer breaks the boring mold and steps out. That's inevitable because the market is already saturated with phones that all have exactly the same features.
The point I put forward is what I and a small select section of the market wants as features—NOT what's on offer from manufacturers now.
The argument people are putting here is that manufacturers would not serve that market. These are two separate issues. Isn't that clear?
When someone makes what I want then I'll buy it. BTW, I've not suggested anything that cannot be made now with existing technology.
Instead, manufacturers are removing important features such as not including FM radio and 3.5mm headphone sockets. These are the first two specs I look for on a phone before I buy it. If they're not included I'm not interested. Full stop!
In brief, the lowest common denominator is NOT what I want. The market has to be more diverse. That in part is what the article is about and why I commented.
The tiny minority of people who want this do not form a market large enough to bear the amortized engineering and manufacturing cost of adding those niche features.
Imagine somebody asking for phones that have a built-in Swiss army knife because there is a (tiny) segment of the market who would benefit from it.
Before it makes sense to integrate these features to the phone, you would expect to see a thriving ecosystem of third-party external dongles providing the same, for example.
The market is not more diverse because there is no money to be made by making it more diverse. You underestimate the cost just as much as you overestimate the size of the market segment that wants those features.
"The tiny minority of people who want this do not form a market large enough to bear the amortized engineering and manufacturing cost of adding those niche features"
I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now!
All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.
If Fairphone were to provide a slot I'm damn sure there'd be call to use it. Think Raspberry Pi and all its ports, just transfer the concept to a phone that's almost suitable now.
> I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now!
Fairphones devices are, frankly, bad value and not particularly interesting. Being able to “upgrade” components is not very useful, if those components are already years behind. Also, fairphone doesn’t allow this! You just can replace components with the same kind… which just makes repairing easier.
> All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.
You have one. It’s called the USB-C port. Make whatever you want with it, it’s widely supported and compatible.
The point you are making is irrelevant as it has nothing to do with my point which is what I want as features on my phone. Whether manufacturers make them or how many other people may want the same as I do is a separate issue.
What phone do you use now and are you satisfied with it?
Tell me that and I may be able to then figure where you are coming from. BTW, read my comment to f6v.
> How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence?
I responded with:
> just look outside in the real world?
That’s totally relevant to you asking why no mass-market phones support increasingly niche features that ~0% of the population need or want, and you expanding on this by saying “me and one other person I know want this”…
> For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement.
I said approximately 0, when compared to smartphone sales… which it is. I don’t need a survey to know that, since the vast vast vast majority of people using phones don’t even know what an oscilloscope, a DAC, or an ADC is. If you think that’s untrue, I’d suggest widening your horizons a bit.
Also, I’d think that you don’t work in test and measurement. I use test equipment in my day job and I wouldn’t trust the output of a phone if I’m doing actual production work. You need calibrated equipment for that. Maybe okay for debugging, but there’s tons of cheap measurement equipment that works just fine for general purpose debugging and has a much better UI than anything you’d get on a touch screen.
To expand upon that point: a new feature for smartphones that really takes off has to fall in one of two categories:
1. so incredibly convenient to always have with you, that everyone's willing to overlook shortcomings compared to dedicated equipment. Prime example: camera.
2. Offer a new type of use that is widely considered desirable. Example: mobile access to Internet.
Most use cases either cater to too few people and/or fall into the category "those who'd really care, already have dedicated equipment which is better". With flagship phones costing more and more, that equipment is probably also cheaper - or, at least, is price tag is not that outlandish.
Even replacing laptops probably won't catch on, simply because companies can easily provide a good laptop for half the price of a flagship phone (if not less). So they're not going to facilitate that. And if the boss isn't on board, would you want to use your own private phone as your primary work laptop?
The GP seems to be basically saying the same thing as many others have expressed. They want their phone to basically be a PC. Whether that involves upgrading, installing your own OS, or otherwise just being able to use it for an arbitrary workload.
I don't know why the market is such, that expensive phones remove features, such as extra sim card slots, sd card slots or head phone jacks. It doesn't seem impossible that Samsung could find room in their lineup of 8000 phones to have a ruggedised phone, with some kind of standardised interface on the back.
especially, as increasingly you go to a restaurant and the waiter has a phone/ tablet. and I'm sure there are many other industries that could do with basically a phone, that does one extra specialised thing, be that an rfid scanner, or a bore scope, or a label printer.
Why have these features built in if you can have a usb back case/device with them?
There are many back cases for specialised functionality like PoS, Ir camera etc.
Also, with many cases you can have devices connecting wirelessly via bluetooth - e.g. I bought a bluetooth trichiscope recently.
Making a specialised phone instead of a plugin is a way more expensive option. And in risky if the market is so small that nobody did a plugin first.
There were I think two companies that tried to build a modular phone where you could eg replace camera
with a module of your own design - the issue was that they were bulkier and more expensive than a regular design - you can’t cheat physics.
Also, how much more would you be willing to pay for such a phone? Could you pay 2-3x the price and be happy with upgrades every 3-5 years, and the phone having electronics that are 1-3 years behind the top of the line ones on the start? Because that’s the reality of production with niche products.
> Even replacing laptops probably won't catch on, simply because companies can easily provide a good laptop for half the price of a flagship phone
You’re comparing top of the range phones to low end laptops. A low to mid range phone can be bought from a reputable manufacturer (Samsung) for about £200 and it has plenty of processing to do email, video calls, PowerPoint, and basic spreadsheets. My wife works for the government and I’m pretty sure one of those phones would be about as responsive as the hunk of junk they provide her with, and for half the price.
Phones are also often paid for too. If you had a keyboard + screen + battery and could just clip your phone in that would feel like a pretty nice setup.
Bonus there is that it's one place for all your data.
Alternatively, on the data side I've been shocked at how cheap storage is now. I bought a 256gb usb stick shipped for £10. I've got tiny 4tb external drives. You can get terabyte microsd cards! It'd be pretty nice to have a setup where the device is intended to be blank and you just pop your data card in. I know it's more complex but not that complex for what would to me feel like a fairly sci-fi thing.
You're right about phones also being provided.
With that in mind, I'd say: if your company and other places of business you tend to visit all go for this concept, I think it could work. But as long as the boss expects you to work on a laptop, this'll remain a niche application.
Honestly, I'd love to be surprised and see everyone switching to docking setups everywhere. But I just think the positives over current working modes are too small to gain the needed traction. And that's before considering downsides other than investment costs/overcoming network effects.
"Also, I’d think that you don’t work in test and measurement"
I've worked in one of the prototype laboratories of one of the biggest electronics companies in the world where we actually developed communication equipment.
Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea is preposterous.
Given your comment, one has to ask what you do and at what level.
Conflating ideas and 'reading' stuff that isn't actually there is the single biggest problem with the internet.
.
> Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea is preposterous.
>> Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).
Your words, not mine. Without more context (which you didn't provide) it's unreasonable to expect me to understand what you mean (you, in fact, advocate I don't 'read stuff' that isn't actually there) outside of replacing actual test and measurement equipment.
I disagree. My phone supports UVC video input so I can plug my $25 standards compliant borescope into it, I can plug my standards compliant rme sound card into it for field recordings, and I have a bunch of input peripherals that just 'surprise work' with android now too.
You should have a look at the GATT spec for bluetooth LE and the UART service. It has never been easier to build scientific devices that rely on your phone for compute. The thing is, I think we're actually at the point where it's cheaper/ more reliable/more predictable to stick an nrf52 chip into a peripheral than try to support a physical connection to your phone - I guess from a security standpoint as much as anything else.
There are a _ton_ of scopes and stuff that sit in the prosumer space that leverage your phone. They're just not wired, and I think it makes sense for them not to be.
Typically I wouldn't consider 'read my other replies to understand what I could be talking about' to be a valid or particularly respectful response when it comes to online discussion, but I've read through most of your comments here, and I still can't figure out what the argument you're trying to make is.
My Ulefone has TWO. And the other one is heavy-duty industrial type connector. As luck may have it, I redesigned that connector, because Aliexpress was not selling one without some instrument attached. https://github.com/timonoko/Ulefone-Usmart-connector
Whoever I talk to those says "smartphones are damn too big", and yet no manufacturer produces reasonably-sized phones anymore, because it apparently "they wouldn't sell" / "market size too small".
If this is too difficult, than your use case is orders of magnitude more difficult. Unfortunately everyone tries to sell to the same generic user, with very little actual space for differentiation targeting niches.
People say want smaller phones that fit in their pockets -- myself included. But are they willing to accept the much lower battery life, the smaller text on the screen, and the reduced real estate on the screen?
My solution is simple, I carry two phones a tiny dumb/feature phone for just phone calls and a smartphone for internet access.
No one can phone me on my smartphone as it uses a data-only SIM so it's difficult for Google and others to make sense of the data they steal from me (even then they only receive data garbage for reasons I won't bother to mention here).
It's hardly less convenient as the dumb phone is small enough to fit in my shirt pocket whereas the smartphone is in a trousers pocket.
Motorola did a sort of add-on thing with their Moto Z some years back. It had swappable back-plates. They launched an extended battery, a speaker, a camera with larger optics and mechanical zoom, a projector attachment... some sort of amazon-branded smart-speaker attachment... they were supposed to kick off an add-on ecosystem but I guess it turned out most people weren't really bothered.
Not quite what you're asking for, it wasn't standard bus connectors or anything.
For any professional interesting sensor use you'd want something that is certified by a trusted third-party. The costs from this easily would overcome any savings you did in hardware.
And also a lot of professional equipment providers are going sort of this way, building portable devices around a OEM android phone.
just a guess, but I've noticed that most app development has concentrated around crossplatform frameworks/languages. If you're writing in JS or Dart or whatever you're not typically going to write a high performance app that has tight integration with an optional peripheral.
As far as I understand the weird ART vs JVM difference also means Java libs are only sometimes going to work (would love to be corrected here though)
I think you haven’t considered the luxury goods aspect of higher-end phones. The majority of people buying new phones every year or two don’t carefully study specs, and don’t need to use a PC or laptop at all, or only need a “real” computer for work or specific tasks. Already smartphones serve as the primary internet access device for a majority of internet users.
Sales of new phone models have a lot more to do with perceived status and obsolescence (real or imagined). Actual performance improvements remain largely incremental and irrelevant for the majority of phone users, but perception and fear of obsolescence drive sales anyway. The same goes for camera quality: actually important to a small percentage of users, but perceived as important by a lot more users even if they only post low-quality snapshots online.
Most people don’t need to “upgrade” their purse, sneakers, watch, car, etc. as often as they do. Smartphones have turned into Veblen goods for some, and status display for many more. Spend some time with teenagers. Their fears of not having the newest phone derive entirely from perceived status and fitting in, not from number of USB ports or processor speed.
The number of smartphone users actually interested in using their phone as a PC — with external monitor, keyboard, pointing device — describes a small niche of the smartphone market. Solutions have existed for some time (Samsung Dex and Motorola Ready For, for example). Consumers by and large ignore those offerings and buy for status and FOMO reasons.
The phone manufacturers have so far succeeded in selling disposable and un-repairable devices and feeding the constant upgrade cycle. I have heard many people say they will replace their phone when the screen cracks or it gets too many scratches — the same way they would justify discarding a pair of shoes rather than getting them repaired.
Imagine you only can buy Ferrari SUV from now on (coming with built in dishwasher as standard extra). Whatever your usecase is. Be it a family car for shopping, small utility vechicle for delivering goods to a construction site, want to go camping in Siberia with friends, or need something to plough your fields. With small compromises it could substitute an electric bike or a scooter as well!! Luxury cars for everyone!!
I think lots of people here have little understanding how expensive $600 to a stay at home mom or teen is. Getting an iphone says you got middle class money(even if it was $12/mo for the next 5 years).
There are upper-middle class equivalents of this. Cars come to mind.
It is interesting explaining to a middle class person why I have a $100 crappy phone. "My old one broke, and I have 4 of these $100 phones for my wife's company, so I'm using it until I find a good phone with an Aux port". Ease is everything.
The cheapest iphones have been $400 or $430 for many, many years now.
Divided by the number of hours a phone is used, the amortized cost of having something you want is miniscule. This is the thing moms will be taking precious pictures of their kids with, video calling their families on, shopping for themselves and others, and even watching or listening to entertainment.
If there’s one thing that people can justify spending more on for more utility, it’s a smartphone. Obviously, I’m not referring to spending $1k more for a 1 TB Pro Max, but spending an extra $500 is going to make sense to many people for purposes outside of showing off.
> If there’s one thing that people can justify spending more on for more utility, it’s a smartphone.
For a dumb device ? Max 200 €. Browsing the internet on a smartphone is terrible, the GUI is terrible, typing is terrible. DOS level multitasking. Spying machine.
No way i will pay more for this.
I'm just glad I grew up in the era right before smart phones and have always purchased my own cell phones. I'm just too damn grumpy to pay more than like $250 for a phone. I prefer to be on my computer than my phone. But I can understand for people who seldom are on a computer it probably feels worth it to them to pay $500+ for a phone.
As phones look today and as how they are used, I think we have reached peak usability at around iPhone X. Afterwards - the additional computing, camera, network, form factor that have come with iPhone up to 16 - have provided very little additional end-user value.
So unless phone makers want to be in the situation where end-users are less and less willing to pay for and upgrade to a new phone, they have to figure out something new.
Either turning the phone into a massive local personal AI device with lots of local compute. Or as suggested here opening the phone up and turning it into a general computing device.
Personally I would prefer the latter and I am kinda skeptical of the former eventhough it seems the path major manufacturers (Apple, Qualcomm) are taking.
There are some pursing a more general form of computing - in particular Samsung and Huawei:
(Though still a very closed model of computing where the device provisioned with software through an app store rather being completely under the end-user's control. Perhaps business model plays a role here.)
I would pay good money for a phone that isn't a literal tablet in terms of size, and yet there is literally zero options for this. I'm sticking with my Pixel 4a until it dies, and even that is already huge for me.
They actually are starting to come back, e.g. the Xiamo QIN 3 Ultra. The QIN phones also have unlocked bootloaders and you can flash Lineage with Google Play if you need it.
As I started reading this, I nodded in agreement and was going to suggest picking up a used Pixel 4a (my phone) until I read the rest of your comment :-) I also agree that it's already a little big. I remember the memes when the iPhone 5 came out, about how big it was compared to the iPhone 4. Those are considered incredibly tiny right now. There used to be one scenario where I loved the larger size of my 4a, which was when using it as a GPS in my car, but I recently bought a car that has Android Auto, so a tiny phone would be perfect now.
I am currently using a Moto G Play 2024 I bought new for $120. I have zero complaints.
People pay too much for phones mostly out of novelty and image.
When my laptop (2017 Dell XPS 13, Fedora 41, $200 at a pawn shop) dies I will buy a Samsung and use Dex, because that as well is more than most people need.
Also, the reason Apple is not doing this is that it will obviously eat into Laptop sales. They will just end up selling the phone for $4000. :)
The Moto G Play is massive (6"5, 185g) while low resolution (720 pix wide), coming with 4Gb or RAM while the camera is 50M.
I held on to a Pixel 4a for way too long, and it was struggling to deal with the its 12M camera with 6Mb or RAM on android 13, getting 3s of shutter lag pretty often.
Multi-tasking was also a drag, having two windows would freeze often enough I stopped doing it, which was a pain for paperwork.
I can't imagine how it goes with even less.
I'd assume the best strategy would be to first root it to move to a lighter OS ?
I'm glad it works for you, but the Moto G sounds like a seriously compromised package in this day and age. The TFA going with a Pixel 8 sounds a lot more sensible to me.
> I'm glad it works for you, but the Moto G sounds like a seriously compromised package in this day and age.
Well, my bank account is compromised as well. :)
But seriously, I use maps, podcasts, music, browsing, light social media. What I am saying is I use my phone like most people do,not like most people here on HN. ANd it costs 10% of what the base model iPhone 16 costs, which I tried and that new gimmicky camera button is the worst.
The one issue I have is no HDMI out, which is lame, but I do not need it much. Oh, and root is a pain adn there are no ROMS out for it either. Yes, it would be great with teh pure Pixel ROM but Moto's ROM is not that far off.
Ubuntu Edge [1] was a Linux phone proposed in 2013 that never got built, but today we have the Purism Librem 5 [2] which becomes a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor.
The longer I live, the more I think Ubuntu/Canonical and the team is terrible at everything except marketing.
Their terrible and outdated OS was supreme for 2 decades from a simple 'Free CD' marketing trick. The actual performance has always been so bad, people made Mint and quickly abandoned Debian/Ubuntu-family for desktop use.
Hearing the Ubuntu phone failed is not surprising.
Probably you read to much Arch users comments,
many servers run Ubuntu LTS , and many desktops run Ubuntu or Kubuntu.
I tried Debian, Sidux, Arch, Chakra, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint and others
and for last 10 years I am happy back on Kubuntu LTS , there is no magic on the other distros that give you performance and I do my work on this PC, game on wine/Proton, I have latest NVIDIA driver.
The reason I use LTS is because I do not need the latest features+ latest bugs combo from upstream, I can fix the current bugs and wait a few year until I am forced to upgrade.
Btw some Ubuntu developers are also Debian developers so using Mint or other Debian based sitro is still benefiting from ubuntu devs work.
What is it with Debian-family people saying the word 'Arch'.
"Debian is outdated and cant be used with Nvid---"
"ARCH"
"ARCH sucks, too hard"
what?
I never mentioned Arch.
There is some sickness going on with Debian-family members, to see this 'Arch' line across the internet when literally no one mentions Arch, makes me think there some fear mongering going on.
It is decades of Arch toxicity, other distros not only Debian based will confirm it. Arch is an OK distro but their kernel is not faster then a Debian kernel, I run Arch for a whle, I compiled the kernel with the flags for my CPU, I build the required modules into the kernel so it loads a second faster, there was no systemd so I also optimized the boot services. I had a ton of free time. But then I did not had free time, and screwing with the kernel and latest upstream bugs was no longer fun. So as an experienced ex Arch user, there is no magic shit Arch puts in their kernel to make it faster, the horror story you hear about Ubuntu is newbs having issue with GNOME and breaking it by tring to put customization in a DE that does not allow it.
Windows Phone tried this as well with Continuum. It was around 2015 if I remember right, so a couple years after Ubuntu Edge raised the idea, but it did work well from what I saw.
It wasn't a finished product, given time and investment it could have been a pretty slick setup for basic tasks.
This was precisely the target of the Motorola Atrix. They sold a netbook-like "shell" with a monitor and keyboard, and when you plugged the Atrix smartphone in it became an Ubuntu webtop device.
Which is precisely why I would expect it to be the start of such a discussion. The "use your smartphone as your PC" thing has been attempted again and again for, as you said, 13 years. Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want.
That seems hugely important to such a conversation.
There's so many reasons why it's hard to say this is really unwanted. Atrix was a boutique not mainstream product so who knows what would have happened had it been generally usable.
At the time we didn't have anything like usb-c, so it was all special peripherals and displays. Now though a decent % of displays do have USB-c with power, and that's totally different starting conditions. Especially if that display also has a keyboard and mouse plugged in, which many do!
Commercial success requires paving of cow paths, needs a low impedance route to mass success. We haven't been in a spot where that's ever been remotely possible before.
Do I think Android on display is going to totally take over & dominate soon? No, no I don't. But mass availability and a world capable of supporting - making use of this capability has just arrived, and this really lets us get started with these ubiquitous & pervasive computing ideas that, so far/until now, have had to be bespoke offering.
Different but also similar, it feels like game streaming has some reasonable popularity too now, and it's another case of using interconnect across devices & peripherals that I think a lot of people have really grown into & deeply enjoy being able to do. It's still a small segment of people, relatively, but to me it speaks of adoption curves & how success is often extremely slow, how there are real fans who feel great joy & happiness, without the rest of the world being much tuned in or aware.
Modularity was probably a big deal once upon a time because of hardware costs and the difficulty of synchronization. I'm just not sure it's been that that for a long time. Even the iPad which I somewhat hesitantly bought with a keyboard (and pencil) for a versatile travel device, I'm not totally convinced I couldn't have stuck with mu old MacBook Pro for most purposes.
> Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want.
What the people definitely didn't want was the performance of 2011 smartphone for desktop. The use case didn't fail, that device failed because the limits at the time made the phone desktop impractical. And I remember it not being a stellar smartphone either.
But every smartphone also failed until they didn't fail anymore because they were good enough. Phones today have astounding levels of performance so they can easily serve as desktops.
Starting the discussion from impractical attempts made "ages" ago (in tech terms) is a nice bit of historical trivia but not an indictment of the "phone desktop" idea. It's like starting every discussion about EVs with how early 20th century EVs failed because people don't want EVs.
I don't think performance is the only problem. The software is at least as much of an issue.
What kind of software environment do you expect when you connect your mouse, keyboard and 22" screen to a device where everything is geared toward touch input on a 6" screen?
It's not an unsolvable problem and I do think there is demand for it if done right. But it's not a solved problem either.
The iPad is a perfectly usable machine with keyboard and mouse, and it's quite popular so that's a good general model to aim for. Even running some remote desktop (thin client mode) could be a great feature and productivity boost.
> it's not a solved problem either
Never said it is. But we can't use one experience from the baby years of the smartphone to proclaim what won't work or won't have demand today. If we never try to solve a problem, especially because "it didn't work on the first attempt ages ago", then we'll never solve a problem.
The only thing forcing most of us to upgrade every 3 years is the fact that most phones now come with their batteries are either soldered on (in the lower end versions) or come with connectors (most often I think) but replacement requires prying open the case and specialized tools/knowledge.
Honestly, today's phones are an overkill for most mobile computing tasks except for a very small niche of users who might run very high end games. And even there it's not a given.
Battery replacement can be done in specialized shops on almost any phone for a fair price.
My bigger issue is usually that the phones get so heavily outdated that banking apps stop working. And it's based on pure luck if the modding community build something great for my phone so I at least could use it as server, cam, or whatever. Also the charging slots breaking / turning unreliable which most wouldn't repair on a $100-$200 phone.
I fear it's not just about 3rd battery quality but the software driver side where calibration needs to redone for a new battery. If this is locked because of "security" or just inferior then oops, replacements never match first party.
I also had to upgrade a phone for a banking app and a gov pay-your-taxes app (in a certain non-US jurisdiction).
Very hard to understand why that should be. Even the most scary conspiracy theorists would not claim that banks and govs try to force phone tech refresh... unless ... it is really about spyware bloat :)
I immediately put a transparent case around my device as soon as I get it and put a screen guard on it as well. My wife mocks me saying that it totally kills the device's looks but considering how integral having a functioning phone at all times is to... well, existing (and accessing any Govt. service in my country), I take the hit in aesthetics for extra durability.
As a result, all my phones end up looking pristine several years into them being used.
Modern phones are really resistant. I have an almost 5 years phone that I never used a case or a screen guard with it and have been fine with this decision.
Modern devices are already massive, putting a case on then make them even bigger, and in my opnion more prone for falling from your hands.
And I have the extra-advantage of being able to easily locate my phone on family gatherings as I am usually the only one who doesn't have a case. :-)
I think the parent's point about "looking pristine" is less about the aesthetics of it than a way to say that it's intact and fully functional, no wear and tear that would force the user to replace it
I keep it in cover and film on screen since except IT in my free time I like masonry and I drop my phone like 10 times a month and it is still alive after four years :D
I replace my batteries myself and relatively frequently, but still need a new phone every 3 to 4 years because things just change enough.
There's a myriad of small reasons, my last one was because my main payment app was taking 4s to create a damn QRCode while the casher and I stare at the blank page, and also for how hard it was to just answer calls from the notification screen as the phone was struggling at just multi-tasking.
And that was on top of the expending shutter lag and and many newer OS functionalities just not properly working.
And it's not the phone's fault per se, the most critical apps are really crappy. But there's also no incentives for them to be efficient, and they'll keep being crappier and crappier, and I'll probably need another phone in 4 or 5 years either way.
Replaced my kid's phone batteries in a generic shop a couple months ago. Yes, it is not as convenient as just replacing a battery in my old nokia phones but on the other side, I wouldn't like to have an ugly battery cover just because of the convenience of replacing the battery myself every 3 or 4 years.
It is not like we live in the early 2000s where the heavy road warriors had to have a spare battery on their backpacks because the phones would be dead after a coast-to-coast flight.
I was on an iPhone X for six years (bought it used one year old), and had the battery replaced three times. No big deal.
The reason I upgraded was that I was wasting literal minutes per day waiting for apps to load. I live in China, and for some reason the apps here are beyond outrageous in the amount of resources they use. Showing a QR payment code in WeChat, or opening a shared bike in Meituan, frequently took on the order of 10 seconds. I assume the phone was just chewing on a terrifying amount of JavaScript.
I could only keep 2 of these monster apps open at a time. Opening a third would OOM kill one of the other two.
iPhone 16 pro and these actions are basically instant.
With USB-C, surely we are at the point where we can plug our phones into a hub with a couple of monitors attached and get a proper desktop environment?
Samsung Dex does this pretty well, and has been for ages now. It's an undersold feature in my opinion. Samsung used to experiment with using Ubuntu for their desktop environment but they shut that down a while back (I forgot why, I guess it was too much of a pain to maintain).
Microsoft tried to do it with Windows Phone years ago, but phones were way too slow and Windows on ARM was an even worse prospect at the time, so that died too.
I own a Galaxy Tab (an s 8.4?) from 2018 with Dex on Linux (or was it Linux or Dex?) It's a docker container running an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop on the Android kernel. They developed it with Canonical to be able to use the hardware of the tablet to do graphics and probably more. Then Android moved on, Ubuntu moved on and probably they would have had to pay Canonical again to keep it up to date, plus dedicating their own engineers to the project. It was axed and removed from the next update from Samsung.
It worked well but of course Android would kill any Ubuntu process at random if RAM usage reached a certain threshold, so I wouldn't use it for anything heavy. I remember I was able to run a Ruby on Rails project of mine plus emacs. Slower than my laptop but still decent. The real problem was the limited amount of RAM of the tablet and the insecurity deriving from random process terminations.
The sad reality is that market forces don’t want this to happen, since it would cannibalize sales of those other devices. It’s much better for manufacturers to make sure a phone can only do “phone stuff” and a PC can only do “PC stuff”, because then you need to buy both devices.
The HP Elite x3 running Windows Phone 10 had a dock that would let you plug in a monitor and peripherals to provide a desktop Windows environment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Elite_x3
If Intel hadn't cancelled their x86 smartphone chip (Broxton?), I wouldn't have been surprised to see an x86 Windows Phone with a desktop mode.
I'm unconvinced. Lots of people are increasingly fine with just phones. My dad I sort of see but I had a co-worker who told me their kid didn't even want a laptop for schoolwork which blew my mind a bit but so it goes.
Any hybrid would be a compromise for me. I do have multiple systems--almost certainly more than I need.
They absolutely did. Back in the early 2000 everyone in my friend group would tell their parents that they needed a powerful PC for schoolwork and that's how they got gaming PCs.
I'm not sure how to interpret your comment. Do you think kids should be exposed to proper computers or do you think it doesn't matter and can always be picked up later.
I don't see who is refusing to sell you a phone with various attachments that make a workable computer (especially given 3rd party providers). I just bought such with an iPad. You could do something along the same lines with an iPhone I suppose but I'd probably find it unsatisfactory. Still on the fence whether the iPad is still a fully satisfactory companion device for traveling in general.
In the Apple ecosystem, the one “refusing to sell you…” is Apple, and not only the required peripherals but also not making the software work that way. Because if they did, then you wouldn’t need to buy a Mac.
Macs are not especially relevant to Apple revenue at this point. iPad plus magnetic keyboard is getting pretty close. Still not sure that better multitasking would push me over the edge to not wanting a MacBook for serious day-to-day multitasking work.
I do think they're trending in that direction but I actually like that they're not pushing people faster than feels comfortable. I expect to see a convergence of iPads and at least MacBook Airs but we're not quite there yet.
I don't think this true. Microsoft really, really tried to make UWP a real thing so you could buy a Windows Phone and turn it into a PC by adding it to a docking station, and consumers were totally uninterested. I've never seen or heard of anybody using Samsung Dex in any real capacity apart from a party trick either. I think lack of phone-PC convergence is a bottom-up phenomenon, not a top-down one.
It would have helped if they waited that the market would grew beyond 10%, and didn't keep messing up the whole development experience, that even on Windows desktop made everyone besides Windows team lose interest.
Now they want to sell services, while Apple and Google control all major endpoints.
I think Google is well-positioned to do it. They have experience with ChromeOS already, and running Linux apps on Android should be at least somewhat plausibly deniable. Google doesn't sell laptops either, so they aren't especially worried about the cannibalization.
My old Samsung S20FE can plug into my office-issue Dell monitor and give me full Dex desktop (also using the second screen) and connect to the keyboard and mouse that stay wirelessly connected to the USB ports on the screens. IIRC it also made use of the headset plugged in via USB.
If I was a student with Chromebook-style needs (browser-based tools) it would be worth considering instead of a laptop.
Single monitor is probably doable by the majority of phones on the market, but multi-monitor is another story. I’m not sure that most phone SoCs have the hardware to support more than one, which would mean that additional monitors would need to be driven via software ala DisplayLink which might make the phone get hot and negatively impact battery health.
The other issue is demand. I suspect that the number of people who’d like their phone to double as a computer is actually rather small — non-technophiles just do everything on their phone these days, and increasingly the main reason anybody keeps around a computer is for more “big iron” sorts of use cases that are too demanding for smartphones. The market for a converged computer-phone device is basically down to people whose needs would be served by a Chromebook, but would prefer an external monitor and keyboard which is rather niche.
I'd be somewhat interested. Single-monitor is good enough for most people for home computing stuff. And touch-screen interaction on a tiny screen sucks for anything like spreadsheets, composing documents, dealing with PDFs, or dense forms.
I would probably come down to separate devices however, in the interests of security and continuity. A phone is much more likely to be lost or stolen than a computer on a desk at home. I keep my really important stuff on my computer, and try to keep my phone as disposable as possible.
Another thing in favor of separate devices, is that for lightweight usecases that benefit from traditional desktop UX (like spreadsheets, as you mentioned) even cheap PCs have been extreme overkill for the better part of two decades at this point — the latest greatest desktop hardware is barely better than a mid-late Core 2 Duo booted off an SSD for productivity.
One could buy a cheap mini-PC and put some flavor of Linux on it and it’d serve office software duty for upwards of 10 years without issue. Even accounting for FOSS aftermarket Android distros, smartphone hardware doesn’t have that kind of longevity.
My ancient pixel 4a can use a hub for a keyboard and mouse, and a icro projector. It has a chrooted fedora running on it. This has all worked for pretty much as long as android has been a thing, though the display had ro wait on usb-c.
I mean I have a 10 year old MacBook laptop I use downstairs in the kitchen as a "desktop." It's just fine for most purposes. If I needed to pay $10K for such a device and replace it with my phone and a hub sure. But same thing with Xbox. Computers by themselves are mostly not that expensive or bulky.
Me, I already have a laptop. I'm used to working on a laptop. I'm used to having 2 screens in the desktop setup (one being the laptop's). I actively use that fact.
Using only one device would mean a downgrade in my work setup - one screen less. Moreover, if I'm traveling and have to work somewhere on the fly, a laptop offers a decent keyboard and tolerable screen size by itself. And there is a variety of options on offer (larger screens, lighter laptop, more computing power), so I can pick the optimal one for me.
As such, I don't see a smartphone replacing my daily driver, nor my "planned to work while travelling" driver. Best-case scenario it'd a below-average compromise. But the laptop market offers enough choice that I can get a better compromise for less there.
Im surprised Apple hasn’t done this yet. I thought about this maybe 5-6 years ago as a product idea.
My thought was that you had a monitor with a wireless charging pad built into the base, drop you phone on the base and it automatically connects to the monitor and other peripherals and starts charging.
You just pick up your phone and leave and it automatically disconnects.
I think other commenters are right that this would cannibalize Apples own products, which is a shame since I think it would be awesome to have a unified computing device.
MacOS already runs on arm64 and the iphone has wireless charging and bluetooth, so I don’t think there is a lot stopping Apple from doing this.
It would not be hard for them to do this, and some apps exist to emulate a desktop environment when you plug the iPhone into a dock and hook it up to a monitor, but it's pretty sad that Apple won't embrace something like this.
Despite the fact that the largest iPhone and smallest iPad are less than 2" difference, the $130 Apple Pencil will not work with an iPhone Pro Max, and both devices run different operating systems with arbitrary features.
One of the biggest complaints about their latest iPad was that it's so powerful yet limited by iPadOS. I feel the same way about my iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Apple wants you to have an iMac as your desktop, a MacBook for your mobile device, an iPad to watch videos, and an iPhone to bring with you.
Contra Microsoft which tried to use Windows as a beachhead to everything, Apple has actually been pretty successful. I do expect to see more convergence over time. But, even if there are self-interested reasons for not sprinting in that direction, I also think there are good reasons for keeping use cases (e.g. phone/consumer/creator) a bit separated in the near-term rather than forcing everyone in one bucket.
I was in a Microsoft event 15-20 years ago. They showed a fantasy video of a construction foreman leaving his house with his phone, casting its contents to different devices (his TV, stereo, car) on the go etc.
I still can't do that with any Microsoft system. I've been able to do it with Apple devices for a good 5-10 years.
That's what I was able to do with my Librem 5 in the last few years, so yes. Well, almost - there are two display controllers in that SoC and one of them is limited to the internal screen, so you can't connect "a couple of monitors", just one (4K60Hz).
But we are, for ~6 years now? If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone - the most sold phone models in the world (trades place with Apple sometimes) with 60m+ devices/year sold, just plug it in and there you have it. Full peripherial support, you have a perfect multitasking desktop environment and access the same files - called DeX mode.
And yet, this question is here - somehow no one really uses it or even knows about it.
With respect to hardware only, perhaps. But the OS is still locked down compared to a real desktop OS and the apps are simplified for touch interfaces, and designed for content consumption first and production second.
I can't remember what the project was called, but many years ago I remember seeing a concept for a Linux phone that also doubled as your desktop when plugged into a hub.
All Samsung Galaxy phones have a built in desktop OS called Dex. I remember plugging my monitor usb-c cable to charge my phone and being blown away when a desktop UI appeared on the monitor
DeX is very good, lot of fun to use with a lapdock. However, you need to check if the particular model of phone supports it. Usually it's the more expensive models, so Galaxy S, Galaxy Z Fold/Flip, Galaxy Tab S, and 1 single model of A series, the A90 5G.
Works on my S21U. I use it a lot because I have some weird thing where I'll get really tense typing on a touchscreen keyboard, so if I have to type long messages in android-only apps its going on the docking station.
I used to love Dex, but later they removed the support for macOS. It used to work elegantly and android to mac connection was so easy. Being able to take calls, see messages and also file transfer. :)
This and also I don't want a tumor on the back of my phone. Can we go back to flat bodies at the expense of camera quality? For some of us phone cameras are really not _that_ important.
Their point is about battery life, and that a thicker phone is the compromise they're willing to make. They don't want a thicker phone just for the heck of it.
I think they are talking about a battery phone case somewhat like the Alpatronix Battery Case (if you want to look around - I just found one at random.)
That's probably going to provide a lot less battery than just increasing the phone thickness, wouldn't it? There's a lot of redundant layers of encapsulation in that approach.
I actually understand his comment to be primarily about wanting a thicker phone such that there is no camera bump. The possibility of a bigger battery is then a secondary benefit.
Either way, my point is that with a case the pixel 9 is mostly flat, and has a battery life that I can't complain about. How big the battery is physically is unimportant to me. Logically it's big enough.
I think for most people, better cameras are one of the selling points of a premium phone. I even know pretty serious photographers (which at one point included myself) who don't generally travel with standalone cameras for most purposes any longer.
Probably. But, if I look at Apple's advertising, takes better photos and video seems to be a pretty big part of what they're selling. (OK, AI on the new models.)
Most women I know buy the higher end phones for its cameras simply to take better selfies of themselves, they dont game (not stereotype, just stats in my region), they just use their phone for watching videos, listening to music, phone calling and most importantly take a gazillion photos each week.
So nearly 50% of the demographic is buying those phones simply for the camera, and a big screen, nothing else.
I’ve noticed its typically just men (including me), who dont care about the camera much at all, and just want a normie phone that can run most apps.
You can't. It will loose OS support in seconds! Then next update of your essential app will stop working as it needs the newer OS. Also the battery is fused to the screen or what and cannot keep up with the AI assisted emojis needs coming in with a random software update.
As long as apps are kept up to date, I'm not sure that OS-level security updates make much of a difference. Most breaches happen due to malicious apps. I haven't heard of any cases where somebody cracked the OS security and accessed user data.
Most of the world is not using the latest version of Android, and you don't really hear about viruses/malware like we used to with Windows machines in the '90s and '00s.
There are security bugs which allow hacking older Android phones invisibly, via sms or mms. I'm not entirely sure what Android version you need to avoid such problems; probably north of 8.
Nope. Strong no from me - camera is the reason I upgrade (beyond dead battery).
I agree the lens bulges are a pain in the arse, but I want a good camera.
You can buy low-end phones with minimal bump from the likes of Motorola and Nokia if cameras are not important to you. But I want my higher-end (not necessarily premium, but in that direction) phones to keep coming with better and better cameras please, and if that means a bit of a bulge then fine.
The first smartphone I owned was a ZTE Blade 13 years ago. As a budget phone, that definitely had compromised performance.
It's been years and years since I ever felt like my phone's performance was holding back its usefulness to me. I have only ever replaced my phone because the battery could no longer hold a charge or the charging port was damaged beyond use.
It has a camera, web browser, chat apps, and receives emails. It also makes calls and texts. It doesn't lag while doing these things. That's plenty.
What astounds most ist that we have now ~16 years of Android and there is still no all around decent keyboard for power users. It seems like everybody has accepted to use Android just as a consumer OS.
When I started using Unexpected Keyboard the realization that I can just shift + arrow select text and ctrl + x cut it hit me like a bag of bricks. This is such a simple thing, but the existing story for marking and editing text is so bad on phones that I nearly forgot that just making existing shortcuts available would already be a sifnificant improvement.
Sadly unexpected keyboard has other flaws, like no prediction/correction, no swype and less typing accuracy since there are no statistics on where you hit buttons that could adjust the collision borders etc.
I didn't know about Unexpected Keyboard. I'll give it a try.
Samsung's keyboard on my tablet does Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X like a PC. It does more than that. I remember that holding Ctrl highlights a few keys hinting to the allowed combinations. Probably Ctrl-A is among them. It's not close to me now so I cannot check.
I'm using Hacker's keyboard on my phone in Connect Bot to be able to use the arrow keys to navigate in the shell. It does also all the other key combinations that are useful on a terminal. I also don't want my normal keyboard to remember what I'm typing in my ssh sessions.
I just use whatever the tablet has (Samsung, Huawei, Xiommi) they are good enough, given how tablets overtook netbook's market share.
And for other activities, the stylus, as a proper tablet.
Although I do agree, input reckognition on Android is still way behind the kind of apps that are available on iPadOS, but that is mostly app developer's issue, not Android itself.
I'm mostly fine with the default keyboard as it is, but I keep getting tripped up on the location of the backspace key. The key you use to correct erroneous input was somehow put right next to the key to confirm correct input.
Because of this I've sent way too many badly worded, typo-riddled and incomplete messages.
Definitely. There seems to be a long-standing bug in g-board where you tap a suggested word, it's highlighted (IE, it recognised that you tapped) and then - it just ignores it? So frustrating. Will be watching this thread to see people's suggestions...
I think the reason is that after you got used to full-sized keyboards, typing on a tiny screen portion with any software keyboard is just a pain. I cannot type more than several words on a smartphone without getting annoyed.
Are you using an iPhone? iOS keyboards are terrible, to the point where I'm considering switching back to Android. SwiftKey on Android is magical, I just randomly punch keys in the vicinity of the letter I want and it figures out what I mean. I might type faster on Android than on my desktop PC.
I use it mainly because it is the only keyboard app that supports arabic well and because it has better themes. I don't know how much better or worse it is compared to the android version though.
I have (I'm typing on it now). It's abysmal, and it's stupid things missing, like configurable long-press duration, a comma key, or a symbols layer.
They could have easily made it the same as on Android, but they didn't, and I have no idea why. Android is orders of magnitudes faster to type on, it's baffling why they wouldn't just add the features to their iOS one.
As a counterpoint I type at around 90wpm on a physical keyboard (preference is for low carry), but thumb type over 130wpm on a modestly large touch screen keyboard.
The quality of the auto-correction afforded by the operating system matters quite a bit.
> But auto-correction is possible with physical keyboards too, right?
I don't think so, the mistakes you tend to make with physical keyboards are more on the "entirely wrong finger for this letter", rather than "pressed the key right next to it by mistake".
Yeah sure, but how does that work e.g. for code? I wrote 75% of my MA thesis on my phone while waiting for the bus. But that is text that the keyboard was good at predicting — when you have to write a lot of cryptic symbols all of that falls apart pretty quickly.
Have you tried swipe-based input methods? Given a bit of time to learn your style they are much higher WPM and less error-prone than trying to press non-tactile keys on a screen.
Wow! Unexpected Keyboard is awesome! Just trying it out now and typing this message on it. It feels like I finally have some of the flexibility from the desktop keyboard back. It also just really feels like a nice keyboard from first use. And to have a control button and be able to select text by holding the shift button and moving the cursor is a game changer. Even Ctrl+Z works!
Yeah it's too bad it doesn't have auto-complete. But suspect that with the better controls, the need for auto-complete becomes a lot less. Well, I'll try it out for some time and see how it goes. In any case it's nice for dev work on Android anyway (what it was designed for). Not that I like to do that all too much on Android, but it's nice to be able to do it when your laptop is not available.
Until recently, the availability of software updates was a limiting factor, especially for midrange phones.
(Before that, phones were so slow and had so little RAM that software updates made them unusable eventually).
The mid-range Samsung A52 5G now comes with 7 years of security updates and you can get it with 8GB of RAM for less than 300€.
That's a pretty good deal! You just need to replace the battery every three years or so.
Having said that, i think that on-device AI will change things and it will accelerate the update cycle once again because bigger models are better and the models that fit on phones are still anemic these days. Where are the phones with 32GB of RAM? My body is ready!
For me complete privacy is a must-have for an LLM that gets access to pretty much all my data (mails, calendar, location, browser history, chats, address book, health, app use, ...).
But there are other benefits such as the availability, even when your phone is offline, latency and no cost per use.
How is Samsung? I had 1 bad experience with their phones, 1 bad experience with their tvs, a few bad experiences with their appliances, and a bad experience with their SSD.
I just assumed they are the Apple of Android, big marketing budget, expensive, but mid-tier.
I went from S20 to S21 to S24. Before that every Android phone I had was good but qc issues would pop up or some new phone would come out with much better features (eg camera quality is really important to me). Since I switched to Samsung have had 0 qc issues and every camera has been amazing. The only reason I upgrade is because it's free with my carrier so why not? Staying with Samsung if/until it changes.
You just need to replace the battery every three years or so.
If you used it as a PC, presumably in a dock attached to a monitor, keyboard, etc, then it's be plugged in most of the time and battery wouldn't get much use.
Provided you limit the charge level to something like 80% (ideally even 60%). Keeping these batteries at 100% constantly also leads to degradation, even if you don't really 'use' them.
Keeping them at 100% is prone to explosion, actually. When we built a farm at the company I worked at, the more experienced guys advised on specific models that survive all-time on cable.
It has been years already for me, I don't buy any Android phone that goes over the 300 euro barrier, and use them until they are no longer fit for purpose, meaning they die, or get stolen.
Updates are anyway a joke, so I stop caring for that to the point I only have a passing interest on what Android team shows off at Google I/O.
Apple stuff I only use via my employer/customers, but same reasoning applies regarding features I care about.
Happy user of a Galaxy S7 from 2016. It's smaller than what you can get now and has a physical apps/home/back area which I love. I use them till I break or lose them. I never have to care about because I know I can get a second had one for less than 100 euros. Not having valuable stuff with is really liberating. Will use them until I can't no more.
Who regularly gets phones lost or stolen? I did break one once hiking with some sort of rock collision in my pocket but this isn't a regular thing over many years.
I do. One was lost watching a video in the bathtub. A wasp came very closed to my head and I dived into the water with phone in hand sadly. Another one fell off my bike phone holder while riding on old style pavement (lots of vibrations) and the car behind me rolled over it (still functional except for the screen though, I was impressed). Another was lost because I left it in a stupid place that I did not have access to later. All of this during the course of six years which means each phone last an average of 2 years. Not too bad in my opinion.
It actually makes sense though. If they can get a usable phone for about $100, then they can break at least 10 of them before they are even close to the cost of a single iphone. With that kind of reasoning you can afford to do much more risky and fun stuff with your phone.
This keeps being postponed. For some reason Chrome OS isn’t being ported to Android devices. Motorola tried their take. Microsoft tried the windows phone thingy. Nokia had the N900 Linux phones. Even Android was supposed to run a Windows 11 VM just fine. Microsoft killed the Surface Neo. There was a phone shaped Windows PC called the Emporium or something, killed too.
This whole space has been cursed. You can hack some old Nokias or Androids to run windows on arm and have driver issues. You can use a handheld pc console like the GPD Win and get the LTE addon. But there’s no “this phone is a PC“ offering that is really viable.
I suppose having a Pinephone and running Linux is the best option right now.
I used a lap dock for a while (UPERFECT) which allowed me to plug a device via usb c and it would turn the phone into a basic laptop.
> For some reason Chrome OS isn’t being ported to Android devices.
ChromeOS is actively being re-implemented to run on top of the Android kernel.
Reasons for this may range from merely wanting to minimize kernel/driver work, to something more strategic, and nobody high enough up that chain to know seems to be willing to risk their NDA.
I've used it plenty. In fact it's what I used primarily on the lap dock. However, I think it's pretty poor. Android apps really don't feel natural in windows. The window management is generally poor. I like pinning windows to half of the screen, using keyboard shortcuts. Having a consistent clipboard across apps. I think it's an ok solution, but everything runs a bit slow and feels stilted. It doesn't help that wireless solutions have pretty severe refresh rate and lag issues, and usb c makes the setup a bit inelegant. It came in handy a few times that I wanted to do text input and my phone wouldn't be ideal. That's it.
When I was a teen, Symbian smartphones with a physical slide keyboards were all the rage, but too expensive for my budget. I was day dreaming of how cool that'd be to be able to ssh someplace from a phone via grps. I did it years later once (from an early android phone). Now I have an android phone that can do that easily (albeit without a physical keyboard), and yet I never do that day to day. Phones make poor computer and computer make poor phones - it appears easier to send data across then to bother trying to merge them into one.
The real question I have is why software keeps getting progressively slower requiring faster phones. I don't buy the "devs are lazy / management pushes for frequent releases, so devs use poor expensive platforms like electron" or "all manufactures conspire to make phones that age too fast" - both devs and companies have always been like that, I don't see any recent fundamental shift in that. And it is not like current dev experience is somehow fundamentally different and easier then 10y ago - we use similar kinds of abstraction to do similar things (maybe ~20% more productive and simple?). I am genuinely confused.
I can't tell my new Pixel 9 Pro being any faster and I think the effective screen resolution is LESS than my Pixel 6a is, out of the box. I liked the way it fit in my hand better, too. 3 years felt like long enough to "deserve" an upgrade but I kind of regret even bothering to upgrade. The camera is better but that's about it.
While I agree that phones make poor computers, smartphone + Bluetooth keyboard + "found" external display (e.g., hotel room TV) + remote connection to a desktop PC is an excellent alternative to vacationing with a laptop "just in case".
If, like me, you remembered that Microsoft tried this for a bit with Windows Phone but couldn't remember the name to look it up, it was called Continuum.
We need some disruptive movement here, it can't be like that forever. I'm 44 now and waiting for many, many years already for open sourcing everything that is needed to get android phones running native linux as main and only OS with support of all devices on board. I want single device for my daily desktop, VR and phone tasks. I don't need 3 separate computers for these. And I want to HAVE MY FREEDOM with MY DEVICE. And lastly - would give my middle finger to everyone trying to charge extra for this freedom, it is not a slavery with option to buy yourself off.
This article resonates greatly with me. And because this is not happening anytime soon, I run with Android phones in the "throw away" price range (~200€) or even refurbished ones until the battery or the charging port dies, or my banking app refuses service (happened once last year on an old Samsung S9 which was running perfectly up until then)
A higher performance chip can do the things I want to do (such as encode video during a video call) while using less battery, than a lower performance chip could. That is: paying for performance, no matter how unusable that performance might seem is the same thing as paying for battery time. And I'm always ready to pay for more battery time.
That is actually not related to performance but the decreasing node size and related gate switching power consumption decrease. In theory companies could now just keep the heat dissipation constant and increase performance with the more advanced node sizes, but they could just decrease power consumption.
Of course what users see is that their devices are more responsive, also engineers use the new performance to provide more and more cluttered and animated GUI. So you have to have the performance.
> That is actually not related to performance but the decreasing node size and related gate switching power consumption decrease.
Yes. Of course if a chip isn't actually more power efficient at the same times as being more performant then it wouldn't be the case. But that's almost invariably the case, at least long term (if you upgrade every 3-5 years or so).
Also, the people who make phones are usually not responsible for the most performance hungry GUI's. I'd blame heave web sites for that. App writers are going to do whatever makes enough % of people have an acceptable performance.
So you need your own device to be within some margin from the average, or it will be too slow eventually.
That's not always the case depending on the different levers that are pulled designing these chips. Focusing on burst performance sometimes/often end up being less efficient as boosting to higher clocks require higher voltages. Process and architectural improvements that yield increases in efficiency is balanced with how much extra burst performance we can wring out of the design, which is a big part of the article's argument.
Acting like PC is only half of the way, the other half is actually Me being the 100% owner of what is happening on the device. No DRM, No locks, No attestation, No 'software only from vendor stores'. If there is even a single situation where device tells me 'Sorry Dave' then its not my device, Im not the owner.
A smartphone is an appliance like a washing machine or a blender. It should just work. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that perform well. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that require no maintenance and can’t be broken. If I want something unreliable I can program or hack, I will go to a real PC.
Couldn’t agree more. The locked down nature of my iPhone is something I actively desire - the curation on the App Store isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the Wild West that is the play store. I _want_ an ecosystem where developers are forced to upgrade their apps to use the latest APIs to take advantage of the new device features.
> I _want_ an ecosystem where developers are forced to upgrade their apps to use the latest APIs to take advantage of the new device features.
You want thousands of people to do useless and potentially unpaid work?
I want the opposite: that I can write the code once and it will work forever, requiring maybe only security fixes (which is not even required for many apps). I am not interested in spending my time for maintaining the code or "updating to the new API".
> You want thousands of people to do useless and potentially unpaid work?
I think this is an extreme interpretation of what I said. I want software that is maintained. Android has a problem with apps refusing to update to hold onto legacy permissions that are restricted in newer versions (or at least it did when I moved back from android to iOS in ~2022). Apps that don't work with biometrics, or handle the notch properly are other examples.
> I want the opposite: that I can write the code once and it will work forever,
That only happens if the environemnt the code is run in is frozen, and if the underlying API was prescient enough in the first place. Device resolutions and aspect ratios have changed dramatically in the last few years. Access to buttons/input methods have changed on iOS and Android. Hardware has chagned dramatically.
Fully agree with the first part, but not the second. I absolutely don’t care if an app that worked when I installed it doesn’t do new 500MP AI continuity things today. What I personally care about is a selection of apps that don’t suck the privacy soul out of you by design and tradition at the first start. The fact that google not only allows but promotes, let’s say, a gallery that instantly requires address book, sms, gps, bluetooth, etc accesses, and no one bats an eye about it and continues to cheer android phones - is “amazing”.
I rather have more choice and possibilities and control with the added risk of breaking things and the necessity to take responsibility. And it's not necessarily easy to break things on Android, but yeah you have to be a bit more conscious of what you're doing. I guess for people that are not very tech savvy iOS is maybe easier and safer.
> I guess for people that are not very tech savvy iOS is maybe easier and safer.
This is dismissive. I'm tech savvy - I'm a programmer who has written kernel level code shipped to hundreds of thousands of people. It's not about it being "easier and safer", it's about not caring wanting to have to make every microdecision just so I can read an email.
I didn't mean to be dismissive, but that I can see why you would choose iOS as your main OS. Because yeah maybe other people in your family are not as tech savvy and you want to use the same ecosystem.
Also apps on Android usually have sane defaults so you don't necessarily have to make microdecisions in order to read an email.
I think a great example of the android decisions is (or was) “which wallet do I use?” I had a Samsung phone, and used google chrome as it synced with my pc. Except google pay didn’t work with the Samsung phone, so I had to use Samsung wallet (and let’s not mention the fact I had a Fitbit watch which required Fitbit pay, even though they were owned by google at the time). So I ended up with three separate apps which had their own intricacies. Since I swapped to iOS, I have a wallet and that’s that.
Yeah, that's Samsung for you, they put all kinds of bloat in their Android version.
That is why you need to do a little bit more research and be a little bit tech savvy for using Android in the proper way.
I would recommend brands like Google Pixel, OnePlus, Sony, Motorola. They don't put much bloat in their Android versions.
But yeah that is the thing with Android, developers have more freedom with it, so also some will use it to make things worse. With Apple you can't do anything; you're just stuck with what the manufacturer provides you and if you don't like it then you are either the CEO of Apple or it's just too bad for you.
But it cannot. Have you ever seen the kind of setups professionals in various industries are using for their craft? Like DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), 3D modelling (Blender / Maya / whatever), JetBrains IDEs (or others), architects, doctors, etc.
How does that fit on a smartphone's screen? It doesn't.
Your phone is not and cannot be a PC.
A laptop is barely adequate.
Now I'm not saying there's not that one musician who managed to create that one hit from his smarthpone but most musicians use a proper setup. Proper instruments. Proper PC.
Is a phone sufficient to post pictures and vids on social media? Sure. But there's more to the world than social media.
I haven't seen many vids of chip engineers or SpaceX engineers working on next gen tech from smartphones.
A phone is not a PC, no matter how much you're addicted to your phone.
And yet, we managed to work on PCs that were significantly less powerful than modern phones for decades, and got things done!
If you are expecting your phone to be identical to a modern PC then yes you will be disappointed. But its processing power and capabilities are more than adequate for 99% of software.
The percentage of 3D modellers and people running DAWs are very low; running office-style applications and web browsing is perfectly acceptable. We managed to live without the web browsing bit for many years too! Eg. I ran a 386SX and a 486 DX for my homework decades ago, without the Internet. Modern phones are perfectly capable of this.
Notice that generally, environmental impact of an electronic device (depending upon the country you live in) is up to 95% in its manufacturing. Therefore any electronic device should last until it's literally falling to pieces and cannot be repaired anymore.
Second, I'm currently using the OnePlus 5T I bought back in 2017 as my phone. It's perfectly fine, and never feels particularly sluggish either (except at times with LinkedIn, which is probably the trashiest app ever anyway). The only repair it ever received was a battery replacement last year.
My wife still uses the OnePlus One I bought in 2013. It's equally fine for her modest use, and it still runs (LineageOS) with its original battery for two full days without any trouble.
> But I do want performance :( Every phone I've owned becomes a dog after a few months, with apps taking tens of seconds to launch cold.
That's a chicken and egg issue. The more performance you have the less the apps are optimized. We used to do incredible things on very limited hardware, now everything is a bloated piece of shit that uses 10-100x too much ressources
I agree on not using iOS, because Firefox + Adblock + NoScript is incredible on Android.
but... Android sucks because the default permissions and business model on Android all veer towards advertising, and this is heavy on network and bandwidth as well as background processing across lots of apps... and that drains battery and performance.
I switched to GrapheneOS and just disable network on many things like Camera, etc... the Cloud AI features are not worth it... I also run web apps instead of installed apps for the vast majority of things, if an app doesn't require some hardware capability that only an app can provide then it's staying as a web app, m.uber.com works, most news websites work best as web apps with the JS disabled... I routinely get multi-day battery and stellar performance by just not running apps that are always trying to continuously exfiltrate data about me.
I've found only 2 things that don't work the same on GrapheneOS: Revolution banking just does not work at all - so I closed my account with them, and AMEX forces 2FA on every sign-in - which I can tolerate. Nothing else was impacted, everything else is an improvement in performance and battery.
Yeah, that's my experience as well, regarding apps being bloaty. Xiaomi phones also let me disable the network, which I do, and I've found one more thing that made a big difference: Setting the background process count to 1 or 2 from the developer options.
And yes, agreed, I can't live without mobile browser extensions. Tubular for YouTube is similarly indispensable.
It's got to be something relating to usage patterns. I've been buying the cheapest android phones my carrier supports and only upgrading them when my carrier forces me, and I never experience any slowdowns. On the other hand, I use almost no commercial apps, banking and finance being the exceptions. I use a few apps from F-Droid but the rest is just browser and basic phone functions.
The phone I have now is a Nokia branded something, can't remember the model name but it's about two years old. As fast as the day I bought it.
Yeah, I'm sure it's background apps, because I have lots installed, but I'd expect to be able to close them, or prevent them from running in the background somehow, at least.
Got a 9 year old iPhone 6s here. Actually still perfectly usable and annoyingly fast compared to my 15 Pro. Was getting patches until July 2024 as well.
When one phone falls off the bottom of the stack another one goes on the top of the family stack. In service we have a 15 Pro, 13 Pro, 12, XR, 8 and the 6s. I'll push Pro phones down every two years now. Occasionally something needs a new battery and that's about it.
As for usability, there are a couple of problems but once you get used to it and why, meh. Safari+AdGuard (free) is excellent and a lot less dicky than Firefox on Android.
The problem is that phone makers will keep more and more compute-hungry software. For example, when you take a picture on a modern phone, it takes several pictures across time and with different exposures etc. and measures gyro/acc data and I don't even know what else. And then this is all combined to make an approximation of reality. If you don't buy the latest and greatest every 3-4 years, your camera will keep getting more and more outdated because all this fancy stuff won't run without 32 cores and 256 tensors and 10 GPUs or whatever.
I would be happy enough if termux gained access to more sdk functions. I have been running jupiter notebooks and until some previous Android version one could run code against views of the system folders.
FWIW two things have been a game changer for me in terms of mobile UX recently:
- ZMK powered super portable wireless Bluetooth split keyboards
- portable headset-based displays like the Viture XR pro
I am now comfortable leaving my laptop at home with zero anxiety, because I know I can fairly comfortably dive back into anything I need to from anywhere with my split 36 keys, termux, obsidian and earbuds. Yes most of the functionality that makes this possible has been around for a while, but it feels like the peripherals that grease the UX are here now.
> Portable headset-based displays like the Viture XR pro
I'm really not familiar with the physics of this. But when using your glass, the image is put in a parallax between left and right eye to 'appear' at a distance.
But does this mean that your eyes are focusing on a very nearby plane irrespective of where the image is perceived to be by your brain? As in would this strain your eyesight more?
So there are two different things to think about - there's the focus, which is what you think it is, and there's the 'vergence,' which I think is the fancy name for what you're calling parallax. Because the headset isn't trying to project a 3D image (unless you're in 3D mode), there's no parallax - all it's doing is projecting two flat screens at your eyeballs through a focusing lens.
However, because the spacing between the screens is not adjustable, your eyes will always do some level of 'vergence' adjustment to point themselves at the screen, effectively going a little cross-eyed or a little in the other direction. In the beginning I felt like my eyes were a bit too far apart to use the headset comfortably, but a recent software update allowed you to adjust this by trimming a few pixels from the edge of the screen to adjust the position of the image. While it's not perfect, I think it's helped a lot. I've tested this by looking through the glasses with a mouse pointer on the screen while trying to notice at which distance I see just the one pointer, and it's roughly around 3m in front of me, which aligns perfectly with the focus distance of the projected screens.
On the question of actual focus - screen focus itself is actually adjustable on the Viture XR Pro to accommodate for glasses prescriptions, down to a -5.0 diopter. You can adjust focus individually for each of your eyes, and I think it's this that actually makes the biggest difference in how relaxed you can be when you use it. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to adjust it for long-sightedness, but I'm a +1.0 and find there's still room in the opposite direction if I wanted to adjust it more on the dials.
In my experience the trick seems to be light mode, as it gives your eyes a bit more to stay focused on; they take a little getting used to but they're usable. I wouldn't recommend them for programming, but they're great for focused writing (obsidian zen mode) and for drawing / editing work.
See my other comment, but yeah - usable if you tone the contrast down, otherwise the glare from individual characters can be a lot unless they're perfectly clean. Better in light mode. I've never used them for more than a couple of hours at a time though.
I upgrade my phone every 4-5 years and even that is overkill. I could totally use today the Moto G that I had bought in 2014 for the grand sum of €150.
For example, "phones" use eMMC or UFS which are not the choice of those who want "performance" from their personal computer. They prefer SSDs.
Chromebooks also use eMMC. To illustrate, search for the term "eMMC" on Amazon and the results are mostly Chromebooks. Also routers and development boards are still using eMMC.
The main point of increased performance is not to do things faster so the user waits less or can get more done, it is to get the task done faster in order to turn the radios off and power down cores as soon as possible to save power.
And they already had phones that turned into PCs.
They failed because they are a stupid idea. You either need a mobile computing platform with a large screen and keyboard, or a pocketable mobile good-enough-computing/communications/payment platform. What you don't need is a stillborn defective fetus of a disaster where you plug into someone else's greasy keyboard and smeared monitor instead of pulling out a laptop.
Unless you're one of those weirdos who spends thousands of dollars to build a netbook-sized cyberdeck only to never use it except as a status symbol at hacker conferences.
The only thing dumber than carrying around a phone to use it as a PC is trying to use and change settings in a phone OS via a Linux terminal emulator.
Also, everyone in here saying the cameras are "good enough" is wrong.
Until a camera can take a photograph of an individual atom from across a pitch-black room while being shaken IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
People who want phones to be PCs remind me of the folks who went all-in on VR back in 2016 who now pretend to ignore the thousands of dollars of trash they have collecting dust in the corner.
Yes, and it's not limited to TUI applications. My Pinephone Pro runs Plasma Mobile, and if I plug it into a dock with mouse+keyboard+monitor plugged in, it switches into desktop mode with floating windows and everything.
Looks like it... exists. And not much more. I doubt it's a high priority for PMOS devs given that lot of internal hardware is still only partially working or not at all.
I really wish there was some startup that made a relatively affordable Linux phone that is competitive with modern phones in performance, stability, and support.
Why? No phone is ideal if you can manage, maybe a wifi only device second, third best maybe a flip phone or burner, fourth would be a cheap "smart phone", and last in my opinion would be scamming yourself for some expensive AI powered device you rent.
> Money thrown at higher benchmark scores could be spent on better cameras, newer battery tech, or anything else on your wishlist.
I am personally much more fascinated at the new possibilities opened up by having all this processing power in a handheld form factor than the prospect of humanity being able to snap slightly better looking Instagram pictures.
Unless that better performance was at the cost of overclocking older designs, making it run hotter and less efficient. I think Intel got into this groove with a lot of their models for a few years doing this. I get what you're saying, and if its clocked lower than its designed for, power savings are incredible (I've gotten 10 hours on an older laptop that did this from the factory)
What I don't understand is why modern phones like my iPhone 14 Pro have UI lag sometimes... Like you can see the frame-rate visibly slow down sometimes on translucency animations etc.
Like the 14 Pro is so much faster than the first couple iPhones, and those didn't even have UI lag like that.
The purchase of phones is Potlatch
"potlatch, ceremonial distribution of property and gifts to affirm or reaffirm social status" https://www.britannica.com/topic/potlatch
I disagree. Smart phones are too locked down to be personal computers. Sure they do "computing things" but you're only allowed to do what they want you to do. They're so limited, I can hardly even repurpose and old phone to do simple things.
What does this mean? With a personal computer I can do anything I want, for my own benefit. With an iPhone I can do what Apple gives me permission to do, subject to what benefits them.
It's interesting you say "just" a tool - I think the median reader here sees tool as an inherent part of what "computer" means.
I'm not trying to dismiss your perspective here, I think you have a real point about the intimacy and personal importance of modern smartphone usage. From a layperson perspective, you're absolutely correct that these deliver on the promise of "personal computer."
But to those who choose to spend more time learning and understanding them, computers are (very flexible) tools, and specifically they're tools where you get to choose the computation being performed. This is why, to me at least, (most) mobile devices simply can't be "personal computers."
Smartphones and tablets are still useful to people with that perspective - but I see them not as a computer but as an appliance. I turn it on, I turn it off, I maybe get to fiddle with a few knobs, but most of it is a black box that hopefully "just works."
And hey, I like that convenience - as long as it's not the only way I have to interact with technology.
So, it may seem pedantic, but I think it is worth distinguishing true general purpose computers from phones. They are absolutely personal - a "personal smart appliance", if you will, but not a personal computer at the end of the day.
I'm not sure I know what that means. Yes, I use my iPhone as a camera but I download pics just as with a dedicated camera on a regular basis. I did break one a year or so back but, given reasonable backup practices, it was no different than breaking a PC or it failing.
More personal in terms of use case, sure. And it performs computations - but it's pretty clear most mobile devices are not really your computer, when push comes to shove.
So, it's hard to call it a PC at the end of the day IMO.
Self driving cars are more automobile than automobiles and AI imagery is more CGI than CGI. It's not really ironic, we name things in relation to what came before them, but then often keep working in the same direction.
I have thought since I got a 13" mobile usb-c screen to not take a laptop with me, but the problem is that ios ux is not designed for this. It is a petty because the hardware definitely supports it.
If you don't want to pay, then don't. Get an older phone or not the high end.
The extra performance is used. Modern photography uses a ton of power, and recording even more so.
Granted, I also think that progress in other parts of the phone has slowed, but it's not like CPU people are the same people deciding how much battery you get in a phone.
I've been feeling the same for quite some time, not only with phones, but also with tablets. I frankly don't need more power in my mobile devices.
I actually feel almost the same for my computers, and the only reason I bought a maxed out M3 Max Macbook was to future proof my self for a very long time.
But I feel this way more acutely with mobile devices. I see no reason at all to upgrade from my fourth gen ipad pro, from my pro max 12 iphone. There's no conceivable use case for me with those devices that require more computing power.
> When was the last time you felt your smartphone really couldn’t cope?
Every day since a couple years now.
> I struggle to recall the last time an app jerked and juddered into life.
I don’t. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t that way at first. It’s just that over time my phone just slowed down. Purging it of its data and unused software did nothing, I just had less and less available memory over time, and maps grew slower and slower, and it was becoming increasingly impossible to open several, sometimes just two applications at the same time.
---
That being said, I do agree with the core point of the article: phones are plenty fast enough.
Heck, I’m pretty sure a snappy modern UI with all the bells and whistles except perhaps a voice assistant requires less than a tenth of the computing power of the average phone. We just need reasonably performing software. Not crazy optimised software, just something that makes decent use of the CPU and GPU, and doesn’t consume too much RAM.
But the market won’t even give us that. You know what, keep that up a few years and I’ll seriously think of switching back to a flip phone.
Yes, but that's battery degradation. Cheap Android phones are inadequate out of the box.
Also, despite Android fanboys getting triggered, I never said that there are no good Android phones. There are. And the median Android phone is more powerful than an iPhone for the money (especially non-US models). The differentiator is that Apple doesn't ship iPhones that are too awful.
This happened to one of my previous Xiamoi Phones too. Apparently the Flash Storage degrades over time, which makes everything that uses I/O super slow. For instance, starting Firefox took almost a minute, but it was usable as soon as all needed data was available in RAM. This is a known issue in the respective community, and sadly kills devices that would still be usable with the latest Android thanks to Custom Roms.
Not my experience at all. I have a 2016 Galaxy S7 in a drawer that would still be fine as a daily driver were it not for the worn-down battery. I have a separate phone from 2020 that I was using as a TikTok device (quite resource-heavy app) and it runs fine even now.
Why don’t you replace the battery? Third party batteries are usually quite affordable and good enough! Even yesterday I’ve replaced a worned out battery on a very old iPhone 5S (2013) for my son to watch things on youtube kids..
Because iPhones are not layers of glass glued together from either end, with a battery sandwiched in-between. Apple gets a lot of shit (deservedly or not), but they have taken pains to make refreshing their phones (battery, screen, etc) a not-garbage experience
If you want to replace a battery on a relatively modern Samsung flagship, you will likely swear, drink, and/or curse the engineers that decided "Glass and glue is good enough"
Then the malware is hiding in the system space, which for some reason takes over 70% of all my available memory.
I’ve heard that as systems update, they keep the old stuff around until you run out of memory. I haven’t checked, and I have yet to reset my phone to factory setting, but if that’s what’s really happening, that’s still unacceptable.
One reason for low memory being responsible for slow loading times, is on the fly (de)compression, to save what little memory the phone has left.
The reason for throttling after battery health dips below a certain point is to prevent the SoC from creating spikes in power demand that the battery is unable to service (which becomes progressively more likely as the battery degrades) so the phone doesn’t crash at inopportune times.
Back in the mid-2010s when I was broke and getting by on a worn out hand-me-down iPhone I would’ve loved to have that feature. It really sucks when your phone dies in the middle of a business call at 40% battery thanks to one of those aforementioned spikes.
Any idea why it only happens to iPhones? I don't think I've noticed this on Androids, where the only impact of longevity is the lack of updates from the manufacturers and then Google Play Services starts to fill up the storage with updates.
Don't bother. Flip phones have enshittified, too. (Alarms don't consistently trigger unless you disable and re-enable them after setting them; sometimes the sound just breaks until the phone's restarted; if any voicemail expires then the phone's voicemail indicator is stuck there forever; J2ME support has been removed, so the only available games are the ones you have to text a premium number to "buy" (even though the software comes pre-installed).)
Multiple different brands have the same buggy OS, even those which used to be household names. This must've saved the companies at least $20 000.
I agree that phone manufacturers should focus on features more than performance as it's been more than fine for some time now. I use an iPhone 14 Pro and it's still more than fast enough for everything I do with it.
As for convergence I'm not so sure. The only place I use a desk is at work and even if a phone could optimally run a docker stack and everything else I need there wouldn't really be a benefit to me. I guess taking a phone home instead of the work MBP would be a bit easier but meh, I carry a bag anyway and then I would need something to plug it into at home.
For personal I use my MBP on the couch. If it was a laptop-like dock that my phone slipped into, ok, that would work but A) Apple will never do that and B) what would the benefit be? I doubt it would be a ton cheaper and I'd need to keep my phone more up to date than I do now because I do want a powerful laptop.
In principle I like the idea, but in practice I don't think it would work for me. What I'd be more interested in is running macOS on an iPad.
I don't want a gaming phone. I want a tricoder phone. Integrated FLIR. Mic that can pickup bat ultrasounds to like 100 kHz. The best MEMS gyroscopes and magnetometers.
Sadly I feel like a harbinger consumer with my tastes.
> When was the last time you felt your smartphone really couldn’t cope?
A couple of weeks ago using Obsidian in an iPhone SE (3rd gen). And I've switched to an iPhone 16 and it's definitely way more fluid (even for browsing).
There is clearly some kind of rat race: more raw power available, less time spent by devs in optimizations (and I guess the PRO to that CON would be less time to market). I'm not sure how to feel about all this, but there are definitely situations of phones that can't keep up.
I hate buying shit for the sake of it, managed to hold out upgrading from an iphone 11 until last month.
I touch my phone 3-4 hours a day. As much as I detest the upgrade rat race (and using a phone so much, but that's an aside), the increased responsivity feels really nice. Definitely worth the money for me.
Observe a young person using their phone. They constantly multitask, rapidly switching between apps like Safari, camera, TikTok and YouTube. Unlike older generations who associate "heavy" apps with desktop software like Photoshop, today's mobile users experience app heaviness through frequent transitions between different apps, most of which are optimised poorly. While an iPhone 16 might be microseconds faster than the 15 at opening an app, processing a picture from the camera or loading a page, these small increments significantly accumulate throughout daily use.
It’s true. I love photography and I prefer so much the experience of editing and doing albums on my iPhone. I stopped doing it years ago on my laptop. I take the pictures and when I’m done within minutes I filtered, edited and shared. Because it’s no pro work there is no point for me to do it on desktop, it’s slower and annoying.
So I’m really happy for the enhancements in processing power for the camera and photography experience.
The apps on the iPhone are really powerful, I can shoot and edit raw on the spot on a great screen without any delays even for 70mb pictures.
