[mwsfc]

Between this and the Samsung Fold it feels like we have entered into the netbook (form factor) era* void. We're past peak smartphone development and are in this space where manufacturers are stumbling around for the next "it" device but creating nothing that is truly revolutionary. Yes, there are "some" use cases where a larger screen on my mobile device would be useful…. But by-and-large I still want it to fit in my pocket and be comfortable navigating single handedly . Adding dual screen & doubling the device thickness is not the solution I am looking for.

*Netbooks were low-powered mobile devices (basically mini laptops) that launched in 2007 and basically disappeared (as a viable market category) after the iPad and its kind were launched in 2010.

EDIT added "form factor" for clarification

[cstross]

Except the netbook form-factor has seen an unexpected revival in the past two years, with machines from GPD and One Netbook (and other Chinese manufacturers) showing up (although they're metal unibody machines, some of them ultrabook spec rather than netbook, and vastly more powerful and useful than their 2007-11 predecessors). E.g. One Netbook just announced the One Mix 3 Pro, with a quad-core Comet Lake i5, 16Gb RAM/512Gb SSD:

https://liliputing.com/2019/09/one-mix-3-pro-is-the-first-mi...

These aren't cheap (like the original netbooks), but they're pitched against the low end of the ultrabook market, for folks who need a better keyboard/typing experience than a Surface Go.

(Disclaimer: I own a One Mix 3S, predecessor to this new version and I rate it quite highly, except for support from the manufacturer which is patchy at best.)

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Netbooks were low-powered mobile devices (basically mini laptops) that launched in 2007 and basically disappeared (as a viable market category) after the iPad and its kind were launched in 2010.

Chromebooks are very much alive and well.

[jetrink]

You're not wrong, by most definitions of netbook, but I think the parent commenter makes a very good point if you look at them in terms of their form factor. Netbooks of that era were these weird little machines with 8.9" screens and 70% scale keyboards. I remember carrying mine in a coat pocket. It was really exciting at the time to see Windows XP running on something like that. In the end, it was a bad compromise and those have disappeared. The netbooks of today are, for the most part, full size laptops.

[GordonS]

IMO, the biggest issue with netbooks of that time is that they were so tragically underpowered! I wanted the form factor - but with enough CPU and RAM to actually use, well, anything, and a screen with a high enough resolution that I couldn't see the pixels!

Back then, all netbooks seemed focused on price alone - almost like they knew it was a fad, so made them cheap enough for an impulse buy.

The tech of the day just didn't stack up - but it does now. I wonder if we might see a netbook revival - small, cheap machines that are actually of doing things?

[r00fus]

Kids can't even play Minecraft on our family chromebook without essentially running a different OS.

Chromebooks aren't a panacea.

[pjmlp]

Chromebooks are an US specific phenomenon, hardly seen anywhere else in the world.

[msh]

In Denmark they seem to be quite popular and being rolled out in schools.

[r00fus]

They're all over public schools where I live.

[mehhh]

Those types of educational accounts have been home to Apple (and later Microsoft) in the recent past, all it takes is one school administrator to flip that district to a different solution.

Hence NeXT's focus on educational institutions prior to being bought by Apple.

[pjmlp]

That being?

They are almost nowhere to be seen across European consumer electronic shops.

[gonehome]

I think the next computing platform gamble is AR.

Facebook is working on building out the tech via VR, but with an eye to AR and generally out in the open.

Apple is building out the underlying software support while working on some AR hardware in secret.

Microsoft has their enterprise hardware, but not sure what they're thinking about otherwise.

Using the phone as a computing device that powers a visual digital AR layer for the real world where you can interact with AR overlays either with thoughts (Neuralink?) or more likely basic gestures (like Oculus' camera tracking, or armbands) would be another revolutionary shift in platform UX and be the big shift away from phone screens.

I'm not sure how possible this hardware currently is or how soon this transition could happen, but people seem to be laying the ground work. Michael Abrash wrote an old blog posts about a couple of reasons why this is hard (primarily drawing black in AR), but he's been at Oculus a while now and I'd be curious how his thoughts have changed.

These foldable phones strike me as a dead end nobody wants.

[Namrog84]

"Microsoft has their enterprise hardware, but not sure what they're thinking about otherwise."

Do you consider the hololens exclusively enterprise?

[gonehome]

Yeah - is that not the case?

There’s also magic leap, but I found their hardware pretty disappointing and I’d be surprised if they survive to actually be a serious player in AR platforms.

[patagurbon]

Only for now I believe. I think they're just pushing enterprise for the early editions. Glorified dev kits essentially.

[hrktb]

This device’s whole point would be outside of the “we” point of view.

In general “we” don’t need a revolution of the current form factor. A sizeable portion of users have stopped upgrading and wait for their current phone to be dead, some are already clamoring for less, going back to iPhoneSE like phones.

I think the duo is not targeting the “we”, but way more specific user niches who have non generic goals and are not happy with even the bigger phones we have now. These people could be enough to float a product line, even if it doesn’t fish the other 90% of the users and their dogs.

I’d compare it to the Surface Studio, which was never expected to be a general public device as well.

[GordonS]

OK, but what is that niche?

I'm not happy with today's massive phones, but that doesn't mean I want a massive phone that can fold in half!

I just want a non-slippy phone that fits in my hand and pocket, and has a high-res screen. Truely, I don't understand the trend for slippy phones that keep getting bigger and bigger :/

[hrktb]

I would guess one niche is people that wanted the 7 inches tablets and ipad mini to succeed more. They opted for cellular models, and would have prefered to be able to message and take calls there, getting rid of their phone altogether (that’s one less device to care about).

Another niche is people who used their phone mostly as a notification device, but switched to the watch for that, and now are frustrated by the tininess of the phone as they use it more and more for “serious” business only.

I am not in any of these niches, but also feel that I am happy with a smaller phone only because I need to pocket it. If I was using a purse everywhere I’d want the biggest thing I can get away with.

[awill]

>Between this and the Samsung Fold it feels like we have entered into the netbook era

Except these will be >$1000 netbooks.....

[sixstringtheory]

I think the future is less/no screen. Typing on these folding phones seems like a worse experience. Typing at all isn't really natural, and neither is staring at planar, glowing glass.

I think the future is conversational computing. I don't own an Alexa/HomePod/etc (yet... maybe some open source on prem thing at some point), but I think that's where the puck is moving. It's just that today their capabilities are somewhere around a rotary phone vs. an iPhone. Better than a telegraph (which I guess in this analogy is _typing_ your words into a document) but still very rudimentary. All it needs is time and effort.

Similar to HomePods, we have AirPods and their equivalents. The phone is just a conduit through which can pass the data necessary for the OS to talk with you, to do what you need.

[untog]

Strongly disagree with this. As someone who does own a number of Google Home devices at home and uses Siri on my phone... voice is a terrible interface.

For one, there is zero discoverability. I can ask Google today's weather. I can ask tomorrow's weather. I cannot ask yesterday's weather. Leaving aside why that would be (I would find it useful to know that it's X degrees hotter/cooler than yesterday) there's no way for me to know that without asking. It's the audio equivalent of fumbling around on a keyboard in a pitch black room. Just imagine placing a food order. It's going to have to read a menu to you and you're going to have to remember it all. No amount of tech improvement is going to change that fundamental fact.

Secondly, you can't multi-task. Or have more than one person using it simultaneously. Right now my wife and I might be looking at our phones at the same time, perhaps looking stuff up, maybe tapping out an e-mail. We'd have to go to separate rooms to do that.

But if I want to know today's weather or play a song, it works fine. As long as it recognises my voice correctly and there isn't too much background noise.

[baddox]

To be fair, when I Google "yesterday's weather" in my desktop web browser I don't get a nice little Google info card. I do get some web results for sites that show historical weather, however.

[sixstringtheory]

We definitely agree that voice interfaces are very rudimentary today. I try to run lots of things through dictation first that normally I would type out with my thumbs on the smartphone or on a keyboard on my computer. Text messages, search terms, commit messages, Slack conversations. Still, it can't perform very basic tasks like changing or backspacing a word or phrase, either because it misheard it or because you want to change it. (And actually as I dictated this paragraph on my 2018 MacBook Pro, it typed out everything I said twice and still required typing interventions, and eventually I just fell back to typing everything.)

You've laid out some good criteria though. I wouldn't say voice interfaces have really "made it" until it gets to the point where you don't have to ask how to ask it to do something (discoverability). You just ask it to do something and it does it. Although that's just one of many criteria.

The food menu problem is interesting, but pretty much everything that prints out on a ticket in a kitchen is structured data–it should be able to be efficiently conversationalized (preference notwithstanding, of course). Certainly there are many ways you could talk to someone about a menu: what kinds of dishes are there? Appetizers, grilled entrees, pasta, salads, desserts. What kind of entrees? Vegetarian, pork, beef, seafood. OK, but what styles of cuisine? Jamaican, Italian, Szechuan. There's probably an analog to the 5 Why's for figuring out what someone wants to eat! Asking yesterday's weather, though, is a specific case that could probably be solved by an intern, provided that data is easy to find on the Internet (FWIW, I've searched for the very same thing many times and it's much harder to find vs forecasts).

I concede that there will always be a need for graphical interfaces. How do you "speak" a map, or a CAD model? I guess I was just thinking of things that can accomplished with a keyboard. You can speak anything you can type, even if it's as rudimentary as today, where you have to say "period newline newline" to end a sentence at the end of a paragraph while dictating.

I agree it might seem tough to multitask. But consider WiFi routers serving multiple computers, or hell, even CPUs serving different processes, "simultaneously." If voice recognition and NLP become sufficiently sophisticated I could foresee being able to isolate multiple overlapping voices in an audio sample. If not, consider that you could ask it to look something up, immediately followed by your wife dictating an email to send–or one of you could even interrupt the other–and it could be able to handle the context switching and queuing at speed.

And I understand there's a lot I don't know, and I do remain skeptical that this could ever be perfected. Would it really be able to dictate poetry? Would the forms I create or creatively destroy in free verse just totally confuse the voice interface? Would it be smart enough to side step the confusion via some pseudo-meta-cognitive process and ask me what the hell I'm doing?

[untog]

> Certainly there are many ways you could talk to someone about a menu: what kinds of dishes are there? Appetizers, grilled entrees, pasta, salads, desserts. What kind of entrees? Vegetarian, pork, beef, seafood. OK, but what styles of cuisine? Jamaican, Italian, Szechuan. There's probably an analog to the 5 Why's for figuring out what someone wants to eat!

To me this is the core of why voice interfaces will always be inferior. In the time it would take that voice conversation to happen I would have been able to scan a menu a dozen times over. Our brains are incredibly adept at picking out visual details - identifying the headers that note each section of the menu, picking out key words that may interest us and so on. There is no technological improvement that will help a voice interface rival that.

[sixstringtheory]

Have you ever watched a person with vision challenges using VoiceOver with the speed cranked up? I bet they could absorb the info they need to know about a menu before the average reader could, even before any hierarchical organization is exposed to the text-to-speech process. The visual hierarchical and keyword navigation you describe is just what I'm talking about with a voice interface, too.

Just yesterday a colleague I was pairing with was VoiceOvering JSON packed with API keys and stack traces. I, conversely, have many times stood with the fridge door open trying to find something that was plainly front and center. Of course, the answer for many things may be a combination of both hearing and vision.

I also wonder if this easily navigable menu you are thinking of is already cognitively mapped in your mind, and you know what to look for. What if the menu is in a foreign or second language, that the voice assistant could translate for you? Or is a completely foreign-to-you cuisine, or just creatively organized in a way you aren't used to, like by seasonality, emotion or geography? I've sat and stared at some dense menus, that I've had to reread multiple times to remember just a subset of the items. In the end I asked the waiter something like in my example: "something with shrimp" or "what do you like?"

I'm not so sure about the things you say will never or always be, and I don't even consider myself an optimist. Finally, thanks for taking this ride with me, it's definitely made me consider more things!

[spdionis]

Except when you can't reply to a message on your phone cause you don't want people around you to hear that.

Let's be real, "conversational computing" may work in movies, but in reality you don't want people in the office or on the street hearing your interactions with your phone.

[davnicwil]

My thoughts too - it works in the home and at a push I can see it working for certain jobs, but it absolutely seems unworkable in public places.

But then I think again and wonder if maybe this is one of these things that seems unthinkable now but in 10-20 years, everyone everywhere will be doing it completely naturally, it's become part of the background noise of life, and nobody will care enough to really listen to what you're telling your computer to search for / do.

Yes on a silent train it might be awkward - but on the street I can honestly see it being fine, especially if attitudes and culture changes a bit as it's wont to do with new technology usage (see bluetooth headsets for a past example of this).

[gambiting]

What are you going to watch your porn on without a screen?

Also, talking to any of those assistants is literally the worst imaginable mode of interaction with a computer, period. Touchscreens in cars are in close second place.

[lonelappde]

Headphones. Audio is a major part of porn, and audio porn is much healthier at night than video porn, because light makes you stay awake longer.

[jhoechtl]

I comute every day early in the morning by train. I would shoot the ones who start interacting with their devices per voice.

[megaremote]

> around for the next "it" device but creating nothing that is truly revolutionary.

I hate people who talk like this, as if there is something magical that people should be working on.

[cltsang]

Hate is a strong word.

But I agree that innovation is often incremental efforts of exploration and convergence, like how we got to where we are in VR today. Magical phenomenal change like iPhone is rather exceptional.

[sp332]

It shouldn't double the device thickness. You can have normal cellphone thickness on one side and just enough for a display on the other.

[pweezy]

I suspect the main reason this type of device tends to be more symmetrical in thickness is to carry an additional battery, needed to power the second display without shortening the total battery life of the device.

[maxwell]

> Yes, there are "some" use cases where a larger screen on my mobile device would be useful…. But by-and-large I still want it to fit in my pocket and be comfortable navigating single handedly . Adding dual screen & doubling the device thickness is not the solution I am looking for.

I'm still waiting for a phone on which I can comfortably edit, build, and deploy code.

[blackoil]

In developing countries, phone is the only computing device most people have and is the primary consumption device taking over TV. So a bigger screen will definitely be valued.