14 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
14 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets
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<p>I’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 – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. Calculators – history. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger. Compasses – munched. Pocket flashlights – crunched. Fobs for keyless locks – being scarfed down as we speak, though not gone yet.</p>
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<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’t be very difficult. I’ve written a lot of the required code myself, and I know where to find most of the rest.</p>
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<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 “tricorder” 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><span id="more-2120"></span></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’t</em> have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually. </p>
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<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>
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<p>So I think the tunable-RF capability I want for my AIS receiver app won’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 – and another two segments of the consumer-electronic industry will disappear down the singularity’s maw. But this is a good thing; it’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>
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<p>I specified “personal” 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’ll be using for hours at a time you really want a full-sized hard keyboard and a display bigger than a smartphone’s; for a really good radio, the kind you supply sound for a party with, you need speakers with resonant cavities that won’t fit in a smartphone enclosure. </p>
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<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>
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<p>These two examples suggest Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, <em>the smartphone will eat it!</em> </p>
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<p>UPDATE: Added calculators and cameras to the hit list.</p>
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<p>UPDATE2: More: Flashlights! Fobs for keyless locks. </p>
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