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Maybe you can use your old "feature" phone as more than just an emergency paper clip.[/caption]
The most popular tablets are essentially scaled up smart phones that don't make phone calls. Critics who pointed this out back in 2010, asked why people with an iPhone would ever want an iPad. Today the question is reversed: people with iPads and Android tablets are actually beginning to wonder if they still need their smart phones. Maybe all they need are their smart tablets and a dumb phone.
Predictions of the death of old-school "feature phones" (that flip-phone you have in a box with your Palm organizer and VHS tapes) at the hands of iOS- and Android-based smart phones may have been premature. The same features that made smart phones look so good: touchscreens, applications, cameras and Internet connectivity, actually look and work much better on tablet computers.
Smart phones are smart just because they can be
Phones got smart because they stopped being phones that tried to play music and games, and became real computers that could make phone calls. The genesis of the smart phone was really a mash-up of a cell phone and a Palm personal organizer.
The Palm Treo 650 released in 2004 was the smartphone of its day: Qwerty keyboard, touchscreen, VGA camera, thousands of powerful apps, good telephone features, and a lame proxy Web browser.
Palm's day lasted until 2007. Apple's iPhone "borrowed" every good feature a Treo ever had, and added all the other features Palm wouldn't, such as Wi-Fi. Palm died. Apple thrived, and smart phones drove all before them.
"Smart" then stole all the thunder from "phone." Remember 2010 and the iPhone 4? Great features, great design, great apps. Crappy reception -- sold like poop through a goose.
Thanks to Apple -- who got the idea from Palm -- apps have become the tail that both wags and sells what is often a dog of a phone.
Thing about choice in a totally consumer-based society is people choose from what's available. So in this case, people chose the better smart phone model that Apple gave them, until Apple presented them with an even better choice; a truly functional tablet.
The argument goes: tablets make much better mobile computers, so maybe phones should just focus on making phone calls again?
The actual solution probably won't be tablets -- not for long -- because the real problem isn't smart phones, it's just the display. The only difference between smart phone and a tablet is the screen size. Now that people -- against industry expectations -- have embraced touchscreens, keyboards and data entry are no longer insoluble problems. But the display still is.
Sounds a bit weird but a lot of people are betting that the real solution for mobile computing lies in wearable micro displays for the human eye. A lot of teams have been working on this kind of technology for a long time.
The best-known effort that is close to reality is Google Glass. Google's not exactly selling pairs of their wearable computer display yet, but they are taking names and numbers. And a pair is available on eBay.
Other company's have put eyeglass displays on the market going at least back to 2009; here's a list of six of them. A lot of them have reportedly sucked, but that was the same problem with tablets before the iPad -- good ideas badly implemented.
Someone will get it right sooner-or-later -- does Apple have an iEye in the wings? -- and then there will be no tablets or phones or laptops, just little slim boxes in a pocket wirelessly connected to eyeglass displays and earbuds that will seamlessly toggle between the real world and and the virtual. Sounds just like it sounds. Click the image to enlarge it.
Back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Snow Crash made wearable computing look really plausible:
Maybe you can use your old "feature" phone as more than just an emergency paper clip.[/caption]The most popular tablets are essentially scaled up smart phones that don't make phone calls. Critics who pointed this out back in 2010, asked why people with an iPhone would ever want an iPad. Today the question is reversed: people with iPads and Android tablets are actually beginning to wonder if they still need their smart phones. Maybe all they need are their smart tablets and a dumb phone.
Predictions of the death of old-school "feature phones" (that flip-phone you have in a box with your Palm organizer and VHS tapes) at the hands of iOS- and Android-based smart phones may have been premature. The same features that made smart phones look so good: touchscreens, applications, cameras and Internet connectivity, actually look and work much better on tablet computers.
Smart phones are smart just because they can be
Phones got smart because they stopped being phones that tried to play music and games, and became real computers that could make phone calls. The genesis of the smart phone was really a mash-up of a cell phone and a Palm personal organizer.
The Palm Treo 650 released in 2004 was the smartphone of its day: Qwerty keyboard, touchscreen, VGA camera, thousands of powerful apps, good telephone features, and a lame proxy Web browser.
Palm's day lasted until 2007. Apple's iPhone "borrowed" every good feature a Treo ever had, and added all the other features Palm wouldn't, such as Wi-Fi. Palm died. Apple thrived, and smart phones drove all before them.
"Smart" then stole all the thunder from "phone." Remember 2010 and the iPhone 4? Great features, great design, great apps. Crappy reception -- sold like poop through a goose.
Thanks to Apple -- who got the idea from Palm -- apps have become the tail that both wags and sells what is often a dog of a phone.
Thing about choice in a totally consumer-based society is people choose from what's available. So in this case, people chose the better smart phone model that Apple gave them, until Apple presented them with an even better choice; a truly functional tablet.
The argument goes: tablets make much better mobile computers, so maybe phones should just focus on making phone calls again?
I scream, you scream, we all scream for eye screens?
The actual solution probably won't be tablets -- not for long -- because the real problem isn't smart phones, it's just the display. The only difference between smart phone and a tablet is the screen size. Now that people -- against industry expectations -- have embraced touchscreens, keyboards and data entry are no longer insoluble problems. But the display still is.
Sounds a bit weird but a lot of people are betting that the real solution for mobile computing lies in wearable micro displays for the human eye. A lot of teams have been working on this kind of technology for a long time.
The best-known effort that is close to reality is Google Glass. Google's not exactly selling pairs of their wearable computer display yet, but they are taking names and numbers. And a pair is available on eBay.
Other company's have put eyeglass displays on the market going at least back to 2009; here's a list of six of them. A lot of them have reportedly sucked, but that was the same problem with tablets before the iPad -- good ideas badly implemented.
Someone will get it right sooner-or-later -- does Apple have an iEye in the wings? -- and then there will be no tablets or phones or laptops, just little slim boxes in a pocket wirelessly connected to eyeglass displays and earbuds that will seamlessly toggle between the real world and and the virtual. Sounds just like it sounds. Click the image to enlarge it.
Back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Snow Crash made wearable computing look really plausible:
"In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack."
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