| For some tasks they are less useful, but there are still a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on local computing power. Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts. Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters? Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility. Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket. Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching. These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible. |
The phone might happen to have an on board address book and calendar, but this was not a statement about access to computation. It's a statement about cost/benefit and use cases.