5 ms·

The anti-smartphone I'd love to see is a small bluetooth communicator with a mic, buzzer and speaker in some sort of small badge, with an SDK like pebble's, but

The anti-smartphone I'd love to see is a small bluetooth communicator with a mic, buzzer and speaker in some sort of small badge, with an SDK like pebble's, but it has to be small and thin. You could do an awful lot of notifications with subtle sounds, and of course have phone calls, send voice messages or text messages (speech to text) via your phone. Love the filtered notifications idea here though. Once you start adding a screen, the battery requirements go through the roof and you need something very big, at which point it's like a cut-down phone without the internet connection and battery life and size become a constant issue. The Apple watch is chunky and ugly in its current incarnation because of these problems, and unfortunately this device is pretty big too. We need internet connected things which complement phones and enhance our lives, not compete with them in different form-factors. Another thing that'd be nice is some sort of colour epaper scroll for a reader which winds up really tight into a tube. It is interesting to think about where the future could take us with printable electronics and better performance, but it feels like we're on the cusp of all these technologies becoming possible, but not there yet - a little like 90s feature-phones - promising but not persuasive.

lmm 12y ago
Have you seen the Samsung neckband thing? It does vibrating notifications, has a mic and reassembles into earphones. I wouldn't use it myself but I'm glad someone's experimenting with weirder form factors.
joshuapants 12y ago
Your epaper scroll idea reminds me of what Rob Pike said at the very end of this interview: http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/ http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/ >The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours. >I would allow the setup to force me to carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  From a usability perspective that would be very cool. But I think we'd need some big changes to our laws. Under current U.S. laws, data you have in your physical possession is subject to greater legal protections than data you have hosted at a 3rd party. Switching to a life without local storage today means accepting lower protections for privacy and legal defense.
  - joshuapants 12y ago
    That's a good point. I guess that could be mitigated by operating your own server, though that would never be a popular option.
- grey-area 12y ago
  I would allow the setup to force me to carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage. Sounds just right, though I'm not entirely sure about the networked data, I guess that is probably the way the world will go. If everything is on the network, there's not much need for local storage.
sliverstorm 12y ago
The hurdle is still the ubiquitous SMS. Speech-to-text is good enough these days that I use it a lot, but I usually have to fix maybe 1 in 10 or 20 words. How would you do that with no screen?
- benologist 12y ago
  If you're a heavy user you'd use a device like a phone or tablet for typing/viewing, like today's smart watches accompanying phones but the phone being more of a client.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    SMS = heavy user? I can't send a single text without needing to correct something. How do I correct _anything_ with no screen? (That said I am impressed with how far speech to text has come)
derefr 12y ago
I would indeed be fine with (what is essentially) a Star Trek comm badge. I think the real innovation that would allow this, though, would be defining standards for "thin client" devices (or apps, I guess) that could auto-pair with these wearables. Imagine if there was a smart discovery protocol that let you take any screen+keyboard "terminal" device (phone, tablet, notebook) and ephemerally, zero-config attach it to a nearby display-less device. It'd be like plugging an old-school TTY into the device's serial port, but with Bluetooth/NFC+Bonjour or whatever is needed to find whatever's nearby, and (say) HTML5 instead of ncurses. Then, you could let your comm badge (and your watch, and your HUD-glasses, and your e-reader, and your iPod Shuffle equivalent) have UI affordances only for their most important functions—and "break out" everything else (settings especially, but also secondary things like adding books, rating music, installing apps...) into its remote-terminal UI. This would also be a helpful thing for home network routers, network printers, etc. You could even take the LCD off a DSLR and make it a dumb opaque box with a lens on a tripod, relying solely on remote-terminal UI for setting up and taking the shot.
- grey-area 12y ago
  I think the real innovation that would allow this, though, would be defining standards for "thin client" devices (or apps, I guess) that could auto-pair with these wearables. Yes, good idea, that'd be really nice. When everything has some intelligence in it, the biggest challenge is going to be the disparate devices communicating and doing what they are good at while handing off data and network stuff to a larger device like a phone or computer. You can sort of see this stuff coming if you squint, but it's quite there yet because of concerns like battery life and weight.

lmm 12y ago

Have you seen the Samsung neckband thing? It does vibrating notifications, has a mic and reassembles into earphones. I wouldn't use it myself but I'm glad someone's experimenting with weirder form factors.

joshuapants 12y ago

Your epaper scroll idea reminds me of what Rob Pike said at the very end of this interview: http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/ http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/ >The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours. >I would allow the setup to force me to carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage.

snowwrestler 12y ago
From a usability perspective that would be very cool. But I think we'd need some big changes to our laws. Under current U.S. laws, data you have in your physical possession is subject to greater legal protections than data you have hosted at a 3rd party. Switching to a life without local storage today means accepting lower protections for privacy and legal defense.
- joshuapants 12y ago
  That's a good point. I guess that could be mitigated by operating your own server, though that would never be a popular option.
grey-area 12y ago
I would allow the setup to force me to carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage. Sounds just right, though I'm not entirely sure about the networked data, I guess that is probably the way the world will go. If everything is on the network, there's not much need for local storage.

sliverstorm 12y ago

The hurdle is still the ubiquitous SMS. Speech-to-text is good enough these days that I use it a lot, but I usually have to fix maybe 1 in 10 or 20 words. How would you do that with no screen?

benologist 12y ago
If you're a heavy user you'd use a device like a phone or tablet for typing/viewing, like today's smart watches accompanying phones but the phone being more of a client.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  SMS = heavy user? I can't send a single text without needing to correct something. How do I correct _anything_ with no screen? (That said I am impressed with how far speech to text has come)

derefr 12y ago

I would indeed be fine with (what is essentially) a Star Trek comm badge. I think the real innovation that would allow this, though, would be defining standards for "thin client" devices (or apps, I guess) that could auto-pair with these wearables. Imagine if there was a smart discovery protocol that let you take any screen+keyboard "terminal" device (phone, tablet, notebook) and ephemerally, zero-config attach it to a nearby display-less device. It'd be like plugging an old-school TTY into the device's serial port, but with Bluetooth/NFC+Bonjour or whatever is needed to find whatever's nearby, and (say) HTML5 instead of ncurses. Then, you could let your comm badge (and your watch, and your HUD-glasses, and your e-reader, and your iPod Shuffle equivalent) have UI affordances only for their most important functions—and "break out" everything else (settings especially, but also secondary things like adding books, rating music, installing apps...) into its remote-terminal UI. This would also be a helpful thing for home network routers, network printers, etc. You could even take the LCD off a DSLR and make it a dumb opaque box with a lens on a tripod, relying solely on remote-terminal UI for setting up and taking the shot.

grey-area 12y ago
I think the real innovation that would allow this, though, would be defining standards for "thin client" devices (or apps, I guess) that could auto-pair with these wearables. Yes, good idea, that'd be really nice. When everything has some intelligence in it, the biggest challenge is going to be the disparate devices communicating and doing what they are good at while handing off data and network stuff to a larger device like a phone or computer. You can sort of see this stuff coming if you squint, but it's quite there yet because of concerns like battery life and weight.