There Are No More Small Phones | Hacker News Reader

There Are No More Small Phones

wired.com

27 pointslaktak12 comments

>> The larger the screen, the more you do with it.

I think this is getting at an interesting point. Over the past decade smartphones undertook a rapid and seem less evolution from a fancy gadget into what's now basically a full fledged minature computing device. It still looks relatively the same, but now has a fundamentaly different role in our daily lives, for better or for worse.

Yes, but let’s not kid ourselves, people are using their big screen phones primarily for messaging, social media, and watching videos. It’s not all that different from what we were using them for 5 years ago.

I'm a mobile app developer, i develop apps on a computer, not on the smartphone itself, nor does any developer i know. I tried an Android setup a couple years back, the overall experience was negative.

A phone cannot replace a computer until that happens. (at least for people like me)

For me personally the limiting factor is the keyboard. If it's a PITA to write something, I'm not encouraged to write productive things on a smartphone.

I've got a foldable Bluetooth keyboard and my phone supports Miracast, and for brief moments at a time I can pretend I have a weirdly small laptop.

It's a "present"/"past-future" that Microsoft envisioned years back that we have all the technical solutions, just not all the practical solutions. Android is too fragmented to sell such a vision wholesale across the platform, and Apple too disinterested, too invested/stuck in keeping devices to specific niches (because it sells more devices).

I just got a Blackberry KeyOne, with a physical keyboard. It is no longer a PITA to write short text messages or emails of a few sentences. I still wouldn't write anything substantial with it.

I'm currently waiting for my Atom Phone. It was sold good, so I think there is still a market niche, even it is small.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jellyphone/atom-world-s...

I run with my phone and I hate the arm bands. With phones getting bigger, it is harder to securely put the phone in my pocket.

Try a Flipbelt or the Nathan, which is a Flipbelt knockoff. I'm a runner and they're essential now.

These are not phones. A smart phone is not a phone. Perhaps we should drop the phone tag? It's like how podcasts aren't limited to iPods. It's a term that no longer means what it says.

I think it's an interesting bend of language. I've wondered if phone is just getting slowly recycled as the word for "handheld computer". It's not a bad reuse of the word, but does lead to a lot of interesting questions about future usage of the word. Would it colonize other computing spaces? "Deskphone" and "Lapphone" instead of "Desktop" and "Laptop", for instance?

That's kind of the future of the word that AT&T envisioned back in the 1950s and 1960s Worlds Fairs and Advertising strategies, so it has a weird retro sci-fi charm here as well, were that to happen.

(Though I'm very pro reusing old, small tech words in new ways. I very much advocate that we should recycle "facsimile machine" aka "fax machine" to mean "3-D Printer", giving us the word "fax" back as "thing I 3-D printed", which currently doesn't really have a good word.)

The Apple Watch is a phone. You can call and text. With Airpods sound quality is good.

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