Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets
<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself.  PDAs &#8211; absorbed.  Music players &#8211; consumed.  Handset GPSes &#8211; eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches &#8211; subsumed. Calculators &#8211; history.  E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger.  Compasses &#8211; munched.  Pocket flashlights &#8211; crunched.  Fobs for keyless locks &#8211; being scarfed down as we speak, though not gone yet.</p>
<p>This raises an interesting question: what else is natural prey for the smartphones of the future? Given my software interests, one low-hanging fruit that seems obvious to me is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System">marine AIS receivers</a>.  If the frequency of any of the RF receiver stages in a phone were tunable, writing an app that would pull AIS data out of the air wouldn&#8217;t be very difficult.  I&#8217;ve written a lot of the required code myself, and I know where to find most of the rest.</p>
<p>But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now.  Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for &#8220;tricorder&#8221; in the Android market.  For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a <em>fictional</em> gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function.  I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably <em>real</em> tricorder in my hand.</p>
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<p>Consider.  My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer.  That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy.  Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you <em>don&#8217;t</em> have a tricorder.  A quad- or quintcorder, actually. </p>
<p>And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about <a ref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization">ephemeralization</a>). Which in turn points at the <em>fundamental</em> reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets;  because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that <em>previously existed only as science fiction!</em></p>
<p>So I think the tunable-RF capability I want for my AIS receiver app won&#8217;t be long in coming to a smartphone near me. At which point, of course the smartphone will eat not just AIS receivers but personal radios &#8211; and another two segments of the consumer-electronic industry will disappear down the singularity&#8217;s maw.  But this is a good thing; it&#8217;s even, dare I say it, environmentally sound.  My cellphone is smaller and lighter than the shelf-full of gadgets it replaces; fewer atoms serving more of my needs means lower impact from manufacturing and less stuff going into landfills. </p>
<p>I specified &#8220;personal&#8221; radios because radios have something in common with personal computers; their main design constraints are actually constraints on a peripheral stage.  For a computer you&#8217;ll be using for hours at a time you really want a full-sized hard keyboard and a display bigger than a smartphone&#8217;s; for a really good radio, the kind you supply sound for a party with, you need speakers with resonant cavities that won&#8217;t fit in a smartphone enclosure.  </p>
<p>Digital cameras are another diagnostic case.  The low-end camera with small lenses is already looking like a goner; the survivors will be DSLRs and more generally those with precision optics too large and too expensive to fit in a phone case.</p>
<p>These two examples suggest Raymond&#8217;s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget&#8217;s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, <em>the smartphone will eat it!</em>  </p>
<p>UPDATE: Added calculators and cameras to the hit list.</p>
<p>UPDATE2: More: Flashlights! Fobs for keyless locks.  </p>
