{"id":43178,"date":"2020-11-10T01:00:41","date_gmt":"2020-11-10T06:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43178"},"modified":"2020-11-09T08:27:40","modified_gmt":"2020-11-09T13:27:40","slug":"qotd-the-smartphone-the-eater-of-gadgets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/11\/10\/qotd-the-smartphone-the-eater-of-gadgets\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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 \u2013 absorbed. Music players \u2013 consumed. Handset GPSes \u2013 eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches \u2013 subsumed. Calculators \u2013 history. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger. Compasses \u2013 munched. Pocket flashlights \u2013 crunched. Fobs for keyless locks \u2013 being scarfed down as we speak, though not gone yet.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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 fictional<\/em> gadget from the Star Trek<\/em> 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 real<\/em> tricorder in my hand.<\/p>\n

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 don’t<\/em> have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.<\/p>\n

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 ephemeralization<\/a>). Which in turn points at the 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 previously existed only as science fiction!<\/em><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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>\n

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>\n

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, the smartphone will eat it!<\/em> <\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2010-07-16.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 absorbed. Music players \u2013 consumed. Handset GPSes \u2013 eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches \u2013 subsumed. Calculators \u2013 history. E-readers under serious pressure, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,41,15],"tags":[675,1235,174,27,547,223],"class_list":["post-43178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-android","tag-esr","tag-innovation","tag-iphone","tag-smartphones","tag-startrek"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-beq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43178"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61396,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43178\/revisions\/61396"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}