6 ms·

> Me, I love mountains... my iPhone is a terrible companion. Battery life is poor. Interface sub-optimal as I wear gloves, sweat, am in motion, etc. What I want

> Me, I love mountains... my iPhone is a terrible companion. Battery life is poor. Interface sub-optimal as I wear gloves, sweat, am in motion, etc. What I want is an AdventurePhone. Replaceable battery. Sturdy. Waterproof. Dual SIM. Easily mountable. Great camera. Solid grip. I see the author's point, but I'd actually approach a solution in completely the opposite direction. The whole reason the phone has become the all-in-one do-everything device is that the vast, vast majority of the time, most people aren't doing some highly specialised activity like skiing. Rather they're going about their daily lives, in a very predictable, stable environment. In that scenario, you want to optimise for convenience, which means portability, which means a small, light, touchscreen device that does everything well enough. In the specialised activity usecase, you want precisely the opposite of the 'all in one convenience' approach - you want specialised tools that each do one thing really well. So you absolutely don't want to swap out your iPhone for an 'adventurePhone' which packs a load of features behind a specialised 'skiiing' interface - that's an unnecessary and almost certainly wasteful mix of specialised and generalised tools - what you do want is a set of specialised tools, each with its own ski-friendly interface, to give you exactly the feature set you want for your highly specialised activity. Camera? GoPro. GPS? Garmin watch. Music? Ipod shuffle. Phone calls/SMS? extremely cheap Dual-SIM solid-as-a-rock dumb phone. Occasional use of chat app? Cheap, light dont-care-if-it-breaks android device.

listic 11y ago
> which means a small Not that small, actually: phones keep getting bigger and bigger over time, a tendency that even Apple succumbed to. It still proves your point, though: manufacturers are optimizing for a stable environment where users are ok with using an unwieldy phone.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I disagree. I dislike having that many devices, I remember being so excited when phones started to have lots of memory and ability to play MP3s - I could skip having an MP3 player. Each device imposes a maintenance burden. You have to remember to charge it. It takes space. It's easy to forget to take that Nth device with you. They're usually not interoperable, they don't talk with each other at all - which is bad, because in this case an integrated device is more than a sum of its parts. People get the Unix philosophy backwards - having lots of small tools is nothing but making waste if you can't compose them together. Personally, I want a SpecOps phone. Everything the AdventurePhone has, plus more ability to hack it. Plus all sensors. There aren't that many things that piss me off more than the stupid market segmentation games phone manufacturers are playing. We could have had a goddamn tricorder. It wouldn't be even that expensive because the parts are already there, and economies of scale works in favour of less differentiated devices here. But we don't have it and won't have it, because mobile devices are designed with sole purpose of milking money out of consumers, instead of giving people a versatile tool to expand their power and abilities.
- davnicwil 11y ago
  I'm not sure we really do disagree, so much as I didn't explain my point well enough. I agree completely with what you say - the maintenance overhead is one disadvantage of the many specialised tools approach. But, my point is, assuming this is a very rare activity, that maintenance cost is paid infrequently and is therefore not, cumulatively, very high. If you ski every day however, carrying one tool for each feature indeed starts to bring too much maintenance overhead and you'd at that point opt for more all-in-one convenience. But the user who does a specialised activity as the norm is very rare, thus such products don't really have a market. I wouldn't necessarily describe this 'many specilised tools selected individually for a known specialised use case' approach as being in line with the UNIX philosophy, which is more 'many specialised tools with the ability to be chained together to handle any use case'. In my example of skiing, the tools don't need to be chained. They can, and preferably should, be quite isolated in their function and use. They're all completely vertically functional - if one goes down, the others all still work fine and only one feature is lost. It's just about unbundling the completely orthogonal features you want and picking options tuned to that specific use case, sacrificing some convenience for better quality in only that use case. The all-in-one iPhone type solution is more about bundling regularly-used (though not always used, in each case) features to work across a broad range of more general use cases, necessarily sacrificing optimal quality in any particular use case for convenience across all of them.

listic 11y ago

> which means a small Not that small, actually: phones keep getting bigger and bigger over time, a tendency that even Apple succumbed to. It still proves your point, though: manufacturers are optimizing for a stable environment where users are ok with using an unwieldy phone.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I disagree. I dislike having that many devices, I remember being so excited when phones started to have lots of memory and ability to play MP3s - I could skip having an MP3 player. Each device imposes a maintenance burden. You have to remember to charge it. It takes space. It's easy to forget to take that Nth device with you. They're usually not interoperable, they don't talk with each other at all - which is bad, because in this case an integrated device is more than a sum of its parts. People get the Unix philosophy backwards - having lots of small tools is nothing but making waste if you can't compose them together. Personally, I want a SpecOps phone. Everything the AdventurePhone has, plus more ability to hack it. Plus all sensors. There aren't that many things that piss me off more than the stupid market segmentation games phone manufacturers are playing. We could have had a goddamn tricorder. It wouldn't be even that expensive because the parts are already there, and economies of scale works in favour of less differentiated devices here. But we don't have it and won't have it, because mobile devices are designed with sole purpose of milking money out of consumers, instead of giving people a versatile tool to expand their power and abilities.

davnicwil 11y ago
I'm not sure we really do disagree, so much as I didn't explain my point well enough. I agree completely with what you say - the maintenance overhead is one disadvantage of the many specialised tools approach. But, my point is, assuming this is a very rare activity, that maintenance cost is paid infrequently and is therefore not, cumulatively, very high. If you ski every day however, carrying one tool for each feature indeed starts to bring too much maintenance overhead and you'd at that point opt for more all-in-one convenience. But the user who does a specialised activity as the norm is very rare, thus such products don't really have a market. I wouldn't necessarily describe this 'many specilised tools selected individually for a known specialised use case' approach as being in line with the UNIX philosophy, which is more 'many specialised tools with the ability to be chained together to handle any use case'. In my example of skiing, the tools don't need to be chained. They can, and preferably should, be quite isolated in their function and use. They're all completely vertically functional - if one goes down, the others all still work fine and only one feature is lost. It's just about unbundling the completely orthogonal features you want and picking options tuned to that specific use case, sacrificing some convenience for better quality in only that use case. The all-in-one iPhone type solution is more about bundling regularly-used (though not always used, in each case) features to work across a broad range of more general use cases, necessarily sacrificing optimal quality in any particular use case for convenience across all of them.