‘Father of cell phone’ reflects on making first call and history 50 years ago
whyy.org
whyy.org
This makes it harder for people who want the freedom of not using a mobile phone.
Mobile phones also have caused people to be less present in social situations and they provide too much information. There's less time just to think and be a person.
I know we have many conveniences with smartphones and cellphones but I do not believe they are worth it and humanity would be better off without them.
One downside: everyone and everything can contact you (almost) instantly
The ability to make a phone call remotely is amazing, but the use of that phone is no different to a wired one. If you don't want to answer the call, then don't.
The second issue is that people get sucked into dopamine pumping applications on their internet connect smartphone, that is a completely different issue.
If you are not at home, with a wired one, you don't answer it. With a cell phone, someone who calls you knows that you don't want to answer.
Only cellphones? What about the internet? It has made the world a worse place by shortening distances, not requiring you to get out of bed in order to buy something, or even to go to work. I only get out of the house once a week now. And don't get me started about social media.
In fact, you could argue that the whole industrial society has made the world a lot worse. And that's what the Unabomber manifesto [1] argued.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...
Doesn't mean I don't want non-smartphone mobile computers to exist though. Believe me, I'd love to strap a 4G modem to my GPD MicroPC. Hell, in theory it could make a decent phone if the market for modems wasn't so awful. But even then, I don't carry around any device the way I used to compulsively carry around a smartphone. Maybe I'm just being dramatic, but it really feels like there's something insidious about the way smartphones are, and I don't think it's all just that the software on them is manipulative. I honestly think that it might literally be a little too convenient.
That's not a fact and it really is your opinion. The fact that I can now go any buy tickets for an event while sitting in a boring taxi for the last 30 minutes is anlofe saver.
Yeah, convenience is basically the common theme of the smartphone. It's a phone, it's a camera, it's an internet communicator, it's a personal music player. I'm not downplaying how useful smartphones things CAN be, yet in practice, I'm often surprised at how utterly unimportant and banal they usually are. It can do so much, and yet somehow it usually boils down to killing time and buying things.
Maybe this bothers me so much simply because it feels like it never had to be this way. There was a diverse world of PDAs, smartphones and UMPCs, but Steve Jobs made a killer demo for the iPhone and the world never recovered. Every mobile device ever since has dreamed of being the iPhone. Useless? Definitely not. But why can't we graft all of these useful features onto something with more utility?
Of course, we can, it's just that nobody is asking for it. The closest approximation I have is sticking a USB LTE modem into my GPD MicroPC. It's fantastic and serves many of the "utility" functions that the internet can provide, and the battery life is pretty good too. It's less tempting to pull out just for the sake of killing time, and it's honestly comfortable enough to thumb-type on that I can use it for some real, if inefficient, productivity tasks. And it's got a real desktop operating system on it. (Well, insofar as much as Linux counts.)
But a lot of the time, I just wind up leaving the house with, well, no devices. It's fine. In some cases it can be a little boring. But you know, it doesn't hurt that bad being a little bored here or there. It reminds me of childhood. it really feels alright to just plain be a little bored once in a while. So sometimes I take a walk, and just don't grab anything, and clear my head for a bit. And if other people don't like/want that, that's fine by me.
But... still, even if people love their smartphones, it doesn't necessarily mean that it has been a good relationship for them.
I, like so many, am at the point where the “cell phone” part of my cell phone needs to go away — the signal to noise for voice isn’t worth it. It’s basically just junk mail at this point.
Of course I want voice, but it’s stepped back to a distant fifth or sixth for utility on my mobile devices, and no longer the reason I carry cell phones.
Of course the invention is intrinsically far more than voice, but it’s interesting that the inventor has lived long enough to watch the utility of his original vision and invention decline (as voice calls specifically).
I wonder if there is an enshitification phase for all technologies that become profoundly commercially successful.
Sorry, maybe I'm a luddite, but I don't follow - what do you believe puts mobile devices on the brink of obsolescence?
We don’t rely on voice calls to communicate at a distance as much as we used to because there are other mediums the modern smartphone can access for that application, but a lot of us still do rely on voice calls on our smartphones for communications of some kind whether it’s WebEx meetings, Discord calls or straight up POTS emulation.
So I'm pretty much at the point where voice conversations on my cell are not an essential use especially if I'm not on an extended trip.
“We still have a way to go. I think phones are too complicated now. The way we use them is not very natural. Holding a phone up to your ear with your elbow opening is not what you’d call a very natural way of talking. We have a way to go. I think that the cell phone is still in its infancy. I think that the children of today’s cell phone, if I could use that analogy, are going to be used for things like connecting to your body, measuring things on your body, understanding when you’re starting to get sick. But talking to a computer somewhere that does a physical examination of you — not every year — but every 30 seconds. I believe that the cell phone is going to be an important part of eliminating disease. And I really mean that.”
On the order of half the people I see using a cell phone already do not do this. They have an in-ear thingamijig with a mic somewhere on the cable, or they have the phone on a surface in front of them and are using the speaker.