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Or that just means that we still call the device in our pocket a "phone" for legacy reasons. If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, V
by Voloskaya 9y ago
Or that just means that we still call the device in our pocket a "phone" for legacy reasons.
If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, VoIP etc, why not the phone app?
- nkrisc 9y agoI don't carry a phone in my pocket, I carry a personal computer that also makes voices calls over cellular networks.
- badloginagain 9y agoObligatory link to Cory Doctorow's 'War on General Computing': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
- nkrisc 9y agoThis was new to me, thank you! The video helpfully has a transcript: https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcrip...
- WorldMaker 9y agoI've been joking lately that there is a new one syllable word for "personal computer": phone. At the current rate that's how the language will shift. I suppose we'll know if people start referring to things like "macOS deskphones" and think "laptop" always meant "laptop phone". :) It's like those futurist ads from the 50s (and 80s/90s) AT&T that soon there will be phones capable of amazing things everywhere in our lives, except they aren't all AT&T branded and most of them started with the name "personal computer". (Though savor the irony that Ma Bell's legacy lives on in Linux by way of Bell Labs' contributions to Unix.) Then again, I'm also strongly for renaming 3D Printers to facsimile machines because the word fax is too useful to lose to ancient toner-based modem printers.
- edeion 9y agoLet's call it a "phown" as a clue to the future generations that nothing is to be considered private any longer :)
- pyre 9y ago> Then again, I'm also strongly for renaming 3D Printers to facsimile machines because the word fax is too useful to lose to ancient toner-based modem printers. Then maybe we really will be able to "receive a fax at the beach"[1] in the future! [1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/50105/you-willsend-fax-beach http://mentalfloss.com/article/50105/you-willsend-fax-beach
- dwighttk 9y agoman, as soon as that ad began playing, I remembered it... Remember the PS9 ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJXLu3YVpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJXLu3YVpM
- nkrisc 9y ago> I've been joking lately that there is a new one syllable word for "personal computer": phone. I wouldn't be surprised. I suspect that a smartphone is the only computer very large majority of today's children has ever used.
- rhcom2 9y agoSomething I never really thought of but that definitely looks like the trend: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/technology-device-ownership-2015/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/technology-device-owne...
- nkrisc 9y agoEver seen a two year old use a tablet? Don't be shocked if in ten to twelve years we have teenagers who can only use a touch interface and can't type or hate using a mouse.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI refer to it occasionally as my hand terminal. That said, it sucks as a hand terminal, because everything it does everything through vendor-locked, cloud-enabled shitty apps with almost no interoperability. If this is how future of computing is going to look, then I'm sorely disappointed.
- thenanyu 9y agoSig. other and I call it "device" as in "did you see where I put my device?"
- jpindar 9y agoWhat sort of interoperability are you lacking? I have apps on my phone that can view or edit most of the file formats I use regularly, and transferring files is easy enough (with or without a network connection). The apps are not as full featured as the equivalent desktop program, but I don't need them to be.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- abecedarius 9y agoIn the early 2000s I was excited about the potential of networked handhelds. Then disappointed when it turned out they'd be phones. I wonder if there's some branch of the wave function where an open PC-style architecture won.
- zanny 9y agoNot sure if having the public consciousness think of these devices differently would help to stop the gross freedom violations they impose. Even traditional IBM PCs are trending towards draconian lockdown to one OS with an extraordinary amount of proprietary code run in firmware and even in the CPU itself, much like how cellular modems (and SSD controllers) work. It is more that the broad userbase doesn't care, and there isn't enough "putting money where your mouth is" to get good economies of scale on freedom respecting computer hardware, regardless of form factor. So the lockdown of "phones" is more a symptom of broad technological illiteracy rather than a cause.
- davidf18 9y agoIts a computer with a photon transceiver.
- 13of40 9y agoFor me, the feature that keeps it in my pocket every day, versus being able to ditch it when I feel like being in the real world, is the phone part. If it was just a PDA I'd leave it at home most of the time.
- pvg 9y ago"voices calls" is such a fine term if you're phone-call averse.
- derefr 9y agoI carry a small personal computer with a data-only cell-tower connection, that sometimes receives voice calls by talking to an SIP server over the Internet, which I pay for separately to my cell service. At this point, the "phone" is more the SIP app itself than the device it's on.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Raphmedia 9y agoIt's a small tablet, really.
- JBiserkov 9y agoA phablet?
- dredmorbius 9y agoMiniSec. http://www.worldcat.org/title/imperial-earth/oclc/978140493&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/imperial-earth/oclc/978140493&...
- Symbiote 9y agoYou could call it a mobile, which is about as common in Britain as calling it a phone. (The full name being a mobile phone.)
- ben_w 9y agoThe German word, "Handy" is also good. They are very handy, after all.
- throwaway049 9y agoMy boss, an old fashioned English gentleman, uses the full name 'mobile telephone' in everyday conversation.
- nolok 9y agoSame in phone "portable" for "telephone portable" (portable can also refer to laptops, for "ordinateur portable"). The word convergence is coming, and the answer might be neither computer nor phone.
- shurcooL 9y agoI call the device in my pocket an iPad mini, and it doesn't even come with a 1st party phone app (unless you count FaceTime audio). I can still make/receive occasional calls on it via Google Voice. But I use it much more as a mobile computer, and appreciate the bigger screen.
- ungzd 9y agoImagine the same situation with other "core" component of smartphone — browser. That you have TrueExplorer Pro that sends each visited url and form data to central server and has broken https. And that you can't replace it with Chrome/Firefox/Opera. It will be worse than custom caller.
- fs111 9y agoIt sends each URL already, they call it "safe browsing"...
- k2xl 9y agoActually, I don't think this is true - I think safe browsing is implemented via checking a bloom filter locally first and then checking google if a match is made on the bloom filter.
- fs111 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing "it depends"
- krrrh 9y agoI mostly use data-only SIMs on my phone and make/receive the very few calls I need to via VOIP, which is almost certainly the near future. For instance in Myanmar, where they have only had widespread mobile phone service for a couple of years, the most popular phone plans from Oodooroo are sold as data-only, and include info for downloading a VOIP app for legacy calls. I had an amusing time in one of their stores watching a perplexed staff try to deal with an older foreign man who frustratingly demanded to know how much he would need to pay for 100 "minutes". They just keept referring him to the chart that showed plans ranked only by the number of GBs.
- djsumdog 9y agoSo.. even data-only sims have an actual phone number right? That's baked into the GSM/HSDPA protocols right? (IIRC only WiMAX and LTE allow IP only without a number). So even those data-only plans must still have a number, that either never connects or cost something insane like 100MB worth per-min?
- krrrh 9y agoYeah there is a phone number. Usually it doesn't work for calls or SMS, or you can have that blocked for it. It's not worth using or thinking about. IMessage and Facetime work with email addresses, whatsapp and signal can be associated with any phone number, and don't need to use the one on your SIM card. Doing FaceTime audio or a VOIP service is at most half-a-MB per minute, and th call quality usually way better than regular cellular. Cheap over LTE, and inconsequential over wifi.
- fulafel 9y agoLTE phones pass your voice calls over VoIP behind the scenes, it's just hidden from the user. They call it VoLTE.
- xg15 9y ago> If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, VoIP etc, why not the phone app? Because of the privacy implications, as the author wrote in the article.
- dheera 9y agoI've mostly deprecated phone numbers as a way of reaching me for the following reasons: - Representing a person by a country-specific number is a horrible UX. All of my contact methods besides phone number remain the same no matter where I am in the world. Several of my contact methods (Facebook, LinkedIn) enable directly "dialing" my real name and intelligently locating me by social proximity instead of asking the customer to program in a stupid number (or multiple numbers) for every contact. A few (Skype, Hangouts) at least allow for alphanumeric, easy-to-remember identifiers instead of numbers. Aren't we in 2017 already? - I want information to flow with me, not be tied to a particular device. Ideally, I should not have to carry any particular device, but rather present my credentials to any device I own (be that a computer, one of my many phones, tablets, or smartwatches). All of my contact methods besides phone number and WeChat are device-independent and align with this vision. - E-mail replaces SMS. It supports >140 bytes. In fact, it can comfortably support several MEGAbytes per message! Isn't that mind-blowing? There is ZERO reason to continue to use a stupid old technology with a 140-byte limitation. As part of the deprecation process, I have all SMS go to my e-mail inbox instead of using the SMS interface on the phone. - I don't take unscheduled voice calls. In general, if my day is going as planned, 95% of the time I am doing something where I shouldn't be picking up a phone (either for my own safety or due to etiquette). That includes machining metal, having dinner with real people, listening to concerts, meditating, coding, hiking (usually without reception), biking, whatever. Unscheduled voice calls are incompatible with my lifestyle. - When scheduled, I do video calls more often than phone calls. As such I'm totally fine with a phone app being third-party. A phone number is not the main reason I have an LTE device in my pocket. In fact, of my multiple LTE-capable devices, only one is capable of receiving phone number calls. The rest have data-only SIMs.
- djsumdog 9y ago> Representing a person by a country-specific number is a horrible UX Phone numbers (and physical addresses) are examples of semi and fully federated systems. You use the standard and establish contracts and your teleco or post office and connect to anyone else in the world. Your Google Hangouts/Skype/Facebook are closed, walled garden, proprietary systems. Keep that in mind.
- raldi 9y agoPaul Graham nailed it: If the iPad had come out before the iPhone, we'd all be calling them "tablets". http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html
- bradknowles 9y agoYou mean, like the Newton? ;)