i quit reading on topic two. that's just some uninformed musings of someone who probably call themselves "tweeters" (and here you saw some uninformed musings on the same level you'd find there. so meta)
> But actually, smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop, not ‘mobile’, and their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet.
Smartphones are mostly used when I'm sitting next to a laptop... are they? Not in my experience.
The PC has the limited cut-down version of the internet? Again... complete opposite of every experience I've had.
Mobile's Achilles' heel is that touchscreens can't be The One True Interface. Finger touches are too vague, involve covering up too much of the screen while you do it, and involve too much imprecision to be the only input. In a nutshell, despite what your initial analysis might indicate, a touchscreen interface is getting too many fewer bits than a conventional desktop, especially as conventional desktops and notebooks grow touchscreens. Voice still seems to be having a hard time covering the gap, making for good demos but definitely having a hard time breaking out in general (i.e., note how you still have to invoke voice on your phone, it is not fluent).
They especially can't be the One True Interface on a phone's screen.
Barring some breakthrough, I actually think what we have now is what we have for the next 5-10 years. Yes, there's a lot more mobile apps to be written, and the numbers for mobile are going to continue to climb, but I think they've largely done their damage to desktops and notebooks now. See how the luster of tablets has also faded.
(The next breakthrough will be phones being able to practically take over notebooks entirely, but despite the steady stream of prototypes we're not seeing any traction. It seems to be hard for a mobile OS to take over all duties of a desktop and it seems to be hard to jam a desktop OS on to a mobile. And it's not strictly speaking the OS, but the app model, security model, monetization model, etc. There's a lot of subtle conflicts between those two worlds right now. I think the instinctive closing of the ecosystems is a big problem here. Note how we're still klunking along with things like Chromecast, where in a truly open ecosystem we ought to simply have a generic display protocol that our phones could both produce AND consume. There's still this deeply foundational idea on all sides that they are the master. Why can't I use my phone or tablet as another laptop screen? Why can't I use my laptop screen as an adjunct to my phone? Why is all my IO hardware so, so very stuck to the hardware that happens to be in them? Is that not a step backwards from the desktop world itself? Answer: Nobody can make any money from standards open enough to solve this problem; if the hardware isn't the "master", it's not making money. The mobile world needs a heaping helping of free software, but it's not clear how to get it there.)
Yeah... to me, most websites on my phone feel so constrained and clunky where they feel smooth and effortless on my desktop. Even most native apps feel constrained and clunky, probably because a lot of companies take the easy way out and just... re-create their website as a native app. Facebook and Twitter sort of do it right, but even then when I run across a link that somebody has posted and it leads me to a website not optimized for mobile it totally breaks the whole experience.
Did you read any of his linked articles? The smartphone use comment is backed by market research. And his PC internet comment is addressed in the same article, describing the additional capabilities of smartphone internet over PC internet.
I hadn't read that. I was probably too dismissive of the claim and the distribution of phone usage was definitely not what I'd expected it'd be. Still I'd question the language of the original article. Saying that "smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop" isn't quite true to the data in that article. It suggests the person has equal access to a smartphone and a laptop but picks the smartphone because it's a strictly better experience. A lot of the at home phone use they're seeing in that study is coming from people who have just a smart phone. Which is really the beauty of smartphones, it covers all your basic needs in 1 device. But I'm not quite ready to believe that smart phones have some better version of the internet and that's why people like them.
This is just my speculation, but people might use smartphones sitting next to their laptop for a variety of reasons:
- Streaming video on laptop while doing something else
- You can't text message or snapchat from your laptop
- It might be quicker to hit an app icon than load a webpage for checking the weather
- You're on your work laptop but you get a personal email on your phone
I think the author's point about a "better" internet is that ubiquity / portability will eventually trump any other advantages you get from accessing the internet from your computer. A larger laptop screen doesn't really help if you don't have wifi access.
There are definite advantages to accessing the internet with a real keyboard and a large screen, but over time those advantages will shrink. Consider this "reversed" review of the Macbook Pro: http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-re...
Can't speak for parent, but I didn't even realize those were links until someone else in this thread pointed it out to me. I'll try to avoid turning this into an aesthetics vs usability rant, but gray text on a gray background with no underlining doesn't seem like a great choice to me.
Incidentally, I have no trouble distinguishing the nice black underlined link in your post here on HN. =P
I am about as partisan a supporter of desktop computing as anyone. I am utterly biased toward both consumption and creation using desktop-grade accouterments—very large screens, full size keyboards, mice, etc. To my mind, mobile devices are a stop-gap measure that suffice when I am indeed mobile. I don't (yet) expect my mobile device to project a 50 inch display and provide a solid tactile keyboard.
However, on that point made by the linked author, I do agree that mobile devices see far too much usage while situated in front of a desktop PC. In fact, I have ranted about this several times, addressing the specific matter in a blog entry from 2012 [1].
I feel there are two problems:
* Desktop computing has suffered from about a decade of lethargy and technological indolence. 4K monitors represent the first forward motion of note in a long time. For a non-trivial number of people, their desktop computing environment is inferior to their mobile device. Many people still aren't using 4K or better on the desktop; many people haven't upgraded their processor or their memory in a very long time; many people still use spinning hard drives.
* Today's common cloud model of computing leads to a disappointingly fractured multi-device lifestyle where we find ourselves drawn to interact with our mobile devices even when sitting at a desktop PC. Technologies such as Continuum and Handoff are a meager simulacrum of what we should have. I've been waiting for the advent of a computing model I call PAO, wherein applications are personal and where singular instances are made omnipresent across all of your devices. I believe we'll eventually get to something akin to that, though probably with a lot less control in the hands of the user than I'd like.
Even if were true that people use their phone more at home than when they are out-and-about, I wonder how much those metrics are skewed by the restrictions of data plans. Companies gouge hard for data, and we've been conditioned to use wifi whenever possible, and avoid those data limits!
> But actually, smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop, not ‘mobile’, and their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet.
Smartphones are mostly used when I'm sitting next to a laptop... are they? Not in my experience.
The PC has the limited cut-down version of the internet? Again... complete opposite of every experience I've had.