Why do people do so much on smartphones?
I have one. I fucking hate it. If I didn’t need it I’d never use it.
And it’s not a low-end, either — it’s an iPhone 6. I have it because having one is required for work, but if I could I’d throw the damn thing in the trash in a skinny minute.
Reading on a smart phone is miserable (though better since the screens have become high-res). Actually achieving anything on one like booking an arline ticket or sending an email is a nightmare. It’s hilarious watching people struggle to do things on a smartphone that I can do literally 100 times faster on a desktop PC.
But that is one thing I like about smartphones — as long as desktop PCs exist and people continue to forget how to use a real computer and associated keyboard, my comparative advantage in the workplace goes way up.
Smartphones aren’t inherently bad. People who use them aren’t wrong for doing so, either. But they are a bit inexplicable to me because they tend to make all experiences worse.
I don’t get bored easily so that’s part of it. I can deal with 10 minutes of doing nothing because I’m always consolidating or attempting to generate ideas.
Other people? I’ve seen little evidence of this. Perhaps in that sense the smartphone is needed.
I think the computer illiterate masses are turning against, if not smart phones, at least smart phone apps. People from all walks of life are expressing disdain at the companies that want to aggressively steer them from mobile websites (or websites in general viewed on mobile browsers) to mobile apps.
While I absolutely hate the touch screen interface for typing and (dog forbid) coding, I like the concept of camera, microphone, accelerometer, GPS, Internet connectivity and other data collection and data processing technologies in one compact and portable package. I’d actually like smart phones for a handful of applications IF there were one based on open source HARDWARE and software, and utterly without DRM, vendor lock-in, etc.