I’ve been using smartphones for about sixteen years now. I use one every day for several hours. But times change and I love new tech. At market close, will I still be daily driving a smartphone of some kind?
There’s obviously a lot of vagueness around what might come next, so here’s a woolly definition of a smartphone that my future devices will be judged against:
a discrete device
Fits in my pocket
Fulfills personal compute tasks
Things that would not be a smartphone:
any implanted device that fulfills the same functions as a smartphone
Compute installed in e.g. the structures I live and work in
Smart Watch
Smart glasses
A drone that follows me round
Brain-computer interface
Things that might be a smartphone:
a tablet computer that can still fit in my pocket
An implant that requires me to make the “call me” hand gesture to make calls.
As this is something I will presumably have some sway over, I will not bet on this.
Since this is vague, can you tighten up your definitions? A smart watch technically meets the requirements.
Also, imagine smartphones transition into becoming 'computing nodes' for an AR system, and although they can still double as smartphones, they become mostly used in tandem with smart glasses. How would you categorize that?
@troops_h8r I am deliberately vague on specifics, because I don’t want to accidentally rule out $future_smartphone based on something I don’t today associate with smartphones but isn’t necessarily incompatible.
I do already rule out smartwatches as they’re an existing product category today that are separate and identifiable.
In your circumstance of a compute node that drives smart glasses (or headphones, or a watch), I would resolve YES because the glasses are a companion tech to the phone, which remains a discrete unit of compute.
I”m hesitant to require, as examples, “must have a screen” because what if the smart glasses become the default interface? Or holograms? Or we ditch screens and speak directly to an AI in/through the phone? Ditto for “runs apps” because what if AI replaces apps? In all those cases I still have a phone, IMO.
If I thought it was really contentious then I would be open to running a poll showing my current devices at time of resolution along the lines of “is this a smartphone as would have been understood by a 2023 person?”