The End Of Stuff

http://bitworking.org/news/2010/08/end-of-stuff

by alexandros • 16 years ago

60 33 16 years ago

akgerber• 16 years ago

True enough. But for this to truly happen you need to have a device with a battery that you can feel confident will last all day with regular use.

andrewljohnson5• 16 years ago

I have a Brunton battery pack and a 6W solar panel. My devices stay charged in the back-country :)

gaius2• 16 years ago

About 10 years ago, I arranged to have everything powered by AA batteries - even my PDA and my phone (it was a Motorola brick). Everything but my laptop, but the PDA (a Psion 5) would do in a pinch. GPS and CD player as well. Torch. Alarm clock. Nowadays I don't think you can even buy stuff to do that with, everything has a proprietary battery and charger.

listic2• 16 years ago

Yes, that tendency bothers me as well. If you want to buy that kind of stuff that is powered by commodity batteries, you are really limited.

Some recent stuff you should be able to buy easily (though they are powered by AAA betteries, actually):

iriver T60SE mp3 player http://www.iriver.com/product/view.asp?pCode=001&pNo=73

WikiReader http://thewikireader.com/store/

but, alas, those are few and I feel like these things go against the general direction of technological progress.

andrewljohnson5• 16 years ago

Good article, and true for me as well.

Let me just say though, as a developer of a compass/GPS app for the iPhone/iPad/Android, and as a serious hiker, I do not take my Garmin GPS with me anymore. I bring paper maps and a compass for back-up, but I never use them. My iPhone is plenty good enough for me.

On the other hand, I'm also a serious enough photographer that I prefer an SLR to my iPhone camera, and even though we built a camera into our app, I never use it personally.

nkassis2• 16 years ago

On mountain bike trips I use my android phone now, I rarely get to anywhere that lacks phone signal but for a real trip that might require a real gps+compas+paper map.

listic2• 16 years ago

Do you mount your phone on the handlebar? What if it gets wet?

I have bought Garmin device[1] for hiking and mountain biking specifically so that I wont' need to worry about it getting wet. And for long battery life and changeable commodity batteries, too.

[1] Garmin Oregon 450 https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=63349

there's also top model '550, which adds camera. https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=26875

prs• 16 years ago

I have this analogy in mind where the modern-day smartphone is the equivalent of a technological swiss-knife. In 80% of all situations it is sufficient for the task at hand.

imd• 16 years ago

Jesse Schell (http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-bo...) said convergence doesn't generally happen, except for the "pocket exception", which includes swiss army knives and mobiles. He predicted the failure of the iPad because of this.

jonhohle• 16 years ago

Didn't watch the presentation, so maybe it's addressed, but what is the iPad the convergence of? Unlike a Swiss army knife (knife, saw, scissors, tweezers, toothpick, etc.), or pocket computer/phone/camera. It's a relatively different type of device (not a necessary new one, though), not a mashup of otherwise independent devices.

jamesbkel• 16 years ago

That was amazing, thanks.

dekomote• 16 years ago

One thing that bugged me tho. Why android? Symbian did that years before android. IPhone too. Even simple Nokia/SonyEricsson not-so-smart phones were able to do most of those listed tasks years before android. We realized that statement that 1-task gadgets/tools will sooner or latter die long time ago.

Edit: Spelling

gbhn• 16 years ago

I don't think the author was saying Android specifically or uniquely enables this (that's just his experience with this process), but rather that the smartphone product does.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

The iPhone opened the door. It made everyone see a phone as something that's possibly very sexy. Android came in after it and implemented a bunch of features that it heard iPhone users complaining about. And now recently, the UI and feel is as slick as the iPhone as well.

The iPhone still has better games, but Android is catching up fast.

Disclaimer: I am on my second Android phone.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

Strangely enough, I completely don't agree. Most of these items are available on my phone, but if I wanted to really use them I'd buy the real thing. For example, if I needed a GPS unit it'd be strapped to the bars of my bike, so it'd need to be durable, waterproof, operable with gloves- things my phone is not. The same applies in one fashion or another to almost every device on that list, particularly calculators and alarm clocks.

patrickk• 16 years ago

Iphone bike kit:

http://gizmodo.com/5605254/liverider-kit-makes-your-iphone-a...

I haven't used an alarm clock in years, I prefer the iPhone in airplane mode. The iPhones calculator seems a perfect replacement for a physical calculator too.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

To clarify, 'bike' refers to a motorcycle, and the iPhone would probably be useless in the backcountry where I'd be using it. Plus if I bin the bike in a river, the iPhone sure as heck won't survive.

Phone alarm clocks are not nearly as effective as my real alarm clock at waking me up; my alarm clock is LOUD and PIERCING and ANNOYING- but I do sleep like a log.

As for calculator, I see that the iPhone can be a scientific calculator, but from the looks of things, I'd still prefer to have my $10 calc in my hands when I'm designing something. That, and/or matlab.

ja27• 16 years ago

I don't use it often, but I keep a real GPS around for two reasons: it runs on AA batteries and doesn't need a cell tower. I actually bought it a couple months after being lost in a hurricane-stricken area. Even maps don't work well when all the street signs are blown down (or away). But I've been on enough back roads in the years since to know that I can't count on a phone GPS for maps.

I also carry a decent flashlight (Fenix LD01). I used to carry a weaker light (Arc AAA-P) but once I had to go from full daylight to a dark interior room with it in a hurry during a power outage and the little light was useless. A phone's screen or photo "flash" LED would have been even worse.

I still carry paper notebooks (Moleskine and others). I use Evernote and stuff for notes on my phone, but I still keep some more personal things on paper, in one place. I also can't sketch worth a darn on any of the phone sketchbook apps.

Dropbox is what eliminated USB thumb drives for me, not my phone. I still keep a couple in my bag, but mostly to boot from.

andrewljohnson5• 16 years ago

Phones don't need cell towers for GPS, if they have a GPS chip like iPhones and Droids! Not even ones with A-GPS... this is a common misconception.

elai2• 16 years ago

Whenever I've tried my iphone 3G's gps that had absolutely no gsm/3g reception from any carriers in the area, the phone cant get my location at all, even in a car or an open air beach.

leviathant• 16 years ago

While a phone doesn't need a cell tower for GPS, they for the most part need one for viewing their location on a map, and I think that's why people say they need a cell tower for their phone's GPS.

Long story short, my wife and I were trying to find the house we were crashing at in upstate New York one evening after a piece of hers was performed at Bard. I'd punched the address into my iPhone and off we went. Only in the last few turns did we realize that Google couldn't find the address and auto-corrected us to the wrong county (UGH). We tried entering the address again, but had no signal. We were only using the iPhone because we couldn't find my Garmin. Later when we returned home, we still couldn't find our Garmin, so I bought a newer one, refurb, off Amazon for ~$150. It tells me the speed limit of the road I'm on, shows me which lane I'll need to be in when a turn's coming up, acts as a bluetooth speakerphone and interface for my iPhone, gets traffic updates and gas prices from some kind of FM broadcast service.

Yes, convergent mobile devices will get there eventually, but there are still benefits to specialized devices.

jleader• 16 years ago

"The end of stuff" seems rather hyperbolic. More like "the consolidation of gadgets I don't actually use that often".

The Swiss Army Knife analogy is telling: how much have sales of Swiss Army Knives affected sales of woodworking tools, kitchen cutlery, garden shears, fancy bottle-openers, etc?

I can certainly see smartphones supplanting special-purpose devices that have similar form-factors and UIs, such as hand-held GPSs. But devices that have different physical forms or interfaces will still retain their popularity for serious uses. For example, how many smartphones can be tripod-mounted? Anyone who spends hours typing large amounts of text on a laptop every day is unlikely to want to replace it with a smartphone (unless the benefits of increased portability so outweigh the inconvenient interface).

Don't get me wrong, smartphones are great, and increased versatility is cool, and having lots of gadgets in my pocket all at once is wonderful (I've carried the same Swiss Army Knife in my pocket since 1979), but there are times when I want buttons I can press without looking (like a stopwatch), or a device I can glance at unobtrusively without having to pick anything up or pull anything out of a pocket (like a wristwatch), or a compass I feel comfortable carrying in my hand while running through the woods.

robryan• 16 years ago

I like the idea of having less stuff in general, I think there was a pg essay on it a while back.

Temporarily moved back to my Dads place recently so I had to cut back down to only really having a room for my stuff, was a great opportunity to clear out a lot of stuff that I wasn't really using.

vishaldpatel• 16 years ago

Some things are cooler / more fun than others. Like, wearing a watch or using a real compass.

I have a notebook in which I write directions to a place before going there for the first time. Lame, I know... but every time I have a get a copilot, they end up looking through the book. I doubt they would have done the same if the directions were stored in a smartphone.

Cash is still king.

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Surprisingly, I meet a lot of people who still use wrist watches. It almost feels like a renaissance of the wrist watch to me.

Can't wait to get rid of stuff. Unfortunately, computers and phones also aren't immune to cluttering, though. In fact, it is even easier to amass virtual stuff.

I have fund it is almost impossible to clean out a computer manually.

The next step will be uncluttering computers by moving stuff to the cloud. The last clutter will consist of bookmarks.

gintas• 16 years ago

The cloud can (and will) get cluttered too...

Tichy2• 16 years ago

That's why I mentioned the bookmarks, which point to stuff in the cloud.

The End Of Stuff

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