
How Do You Beat iPhone? - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-do-you-beat-iphone-9e82786c68dd#.8za73ilpm
======
davnicwil
> Me, I love mountains... my iPhone is a terrible companion. Battery life is
> poor. Interface sub-optimal as I wear gloves, sweat, am in motion, etc. What
> I want is an AdventurePhone. Replaceable battery. Sturdy. Waterproof. Dual
> SIM. Easily mountable. Great camera. Solid grip.

I see the author's point, but I'd actually approach a solution in completely
the opposite direction.

The whole reason the phone has become the all-in-one do-everything device is
that the vast, vast majority of the time, most people aren't doing some highly
specialised activity like skiing. Rather they're going about their daily
lives, in a very predictable, stable environment. In that scenario, you want
to optimise for convenience, which means portability, which means a small,
light, touchscreen device that does everything well enough.

In the specialised activity usecase, you want precisely the opposite of the
'all in one convenience' approach - you want specialised tools that each do
one thing really well. So you absolutely don't want to swap out your iPhone
for an 'adventurePhone' which packs a load of features behind a specialised
'skiiing' interface - that's an unnecessary and almost certainly wasteful mix
of specialised and generalised tools - what you do want is a set of
specialised tools, each with its own ski-friendly interface, to give you
_exactly_ the feature set you want for your highly specialised activity.

Camera? GoPro. GPS? Garmin watch. Music? Ipod shuffle. Phone calls/SMS?
extremely cheap Dual-SIM solid-as-a-rock dumb phone. Occasional use of chat
app? Cheap, light dont-care-if-it-breaks android device.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I disagree. I dislike having that many devices, I remember being _so_ excited
when phones started to have lots of memory and ability to play MP3s - I could
skip having an MP3 player.

Each device imposes a maintenance burden. You have to remember to charge it.
It takes space. It's easy to forget to take that Nth device with you. They're
usually not interoperable, they don't talk with each other at all - which is
bad, because in this case an integrated device is more than a sum of its
parts.

People get the Unix philosophy backwards - having lots of small tools is
nothing but making waste if you can't compose them together.

Personally, I want a SpecOps phone. Everything the AdventurePhone has, plus
more ability to hack it. Plus _all_ sensors. There aren't that many things
that piss me off more than the stupid market segmentation games phone
manufacturers are playing. We _could_ have had a goddamn tricorder. It
wouldn't be even that expensive because the parts are already there, and
economies of scale works in favour of less differentiated devices here. But we
don't have it and won't have it, because mobile devices are designed with sole
purpose of milking money out of consumers, instead of giving people a
versatile tool to expand their power and abilities.

~~~
davnicwil
I'm not sure we really do disagree, so much as I didn't explain my point well
enough.

I agree completely with what you say - the maintenance overhead is one
disadvantage of the many specialised tools approach. But, my point is,
assuming this is a very rare activity, that maintenance cost is paid
infrequently and is therefore not, cumulatively, very high. If you ski every
day however, carrying one tool for each feature indeed starts to bring too
much maintenance overhead and you'd at that point opt for more all-in-one
convenience. But the user who does a specialised activity as the norm is very
rare, thus such products don't really have a market.

I wouldn't necessarily describe this 'many specilised tools selected
individually for a known specialised use case' approach as being in line with
the UNIX philosophy, which is more 'many specialised tools with the ability to
be chained together to handle any use case'.

In my example of skiing, the tools don't need to be chained. They can, and
preferably should, be quite isolated in their function and use. They're all
completely vertically functional - if one goes down, the others all still work
fine and only one feature is lost. It's just about unbundling the completely
orthogonal features you want and picking options tuned to that specific use
case, sacrificing some convenience for better quality in only that use case.

The all-in-one iPhone type solution is more about bundling regularly-used
(though not always used, in each case) features to work across a broad range
of more general use cases, necessarily sacrificing optimal quality in any
particular use case for convenience across all of them.

------
andrewla
I'm a huge iPhone fan, but even I have to admit that the core premise here is
a bit far-fetched. The other phones are not trailing the iPhone, they're
leading it. There's not a single feature (maybe force-touch?) that my Android
friends have not crowed about having long before it finally arrived on the
next iPhone iteration.

Apple is doing here what Microsoft did when they were in their prime. Let the
other guys experiment with a ton of random features, and then wait, and copy
the best features from the last batch, but make them a little better.

~~~
daniel_levine
Apple is first to a bunch of things: Apple Pay, Force Touch, Touch ID etc.

They're also so much further ahead on dimensions like performance, battery
life, build quality, camera, apps, etc. Those things are so important, I think
they're similar to "being first"

~~~
mkane848
Apple Pay and TouchID? Come on now, at least retina displays and Force Touch
are good examples, but Apple certainly wasn't the first to implement eWallets
or fingerprints linked to your ID.

And while I'll concede that things like their cameras are great, the only
reason certain things like performance and battery life are what they are is
because they control iOS AND all of the hardware running it. And app
development on iOS has just as many pros and cons as developing for Android, I
don't think it fair to label one as better in that regard.

~~~
pravka
Not even Force Touch is a good example; Android has had getPressure() API
since v1.

~~~
mkane848
Huh, TIL. Thanks!

------
noir_lord
> surely there’s got to be more in our future than just chasing incrementalism
> — walking the incremental iPhone walk, two steps behind.

You wait for something you see a lot on here a "paradigm shift".

Incremental improvements over the incumbent rarely displace the incumbent
(unless they do something crazy).

If the desktop had stayed the primary computing device most people interacted
with Microsoft would still have a complete lock on the entire thing,
Smartphones and Tablets as mass market consumer devices disrupted Microsoft's
monopoly by forcing them to compete in a world with devices _not_ running
their OS.

I doubt anyone will beat Apple at making a better smartphone in the short-
medium term (I use a Nexus 4 but that was purely a cost/good enough decision)
but I wouldn't bet against something coming out that creates a window, if I
had to hazard a guess I'd say something like VR/AR in a consumer friendly
package at an affordable price but you'd still need some kind of hardware to
run the unit and I think a Smartphone is the natural fit for that so maybe the
phone will stay central longer than I expect.

What I'd really like is something about the weight of the specs I wear for
screen work, that has intelligent feeds that I can customise for what I'm
doing, if you could overlay video and such on top of that you'd really have
something.

I regulary repair my roadbike and sometimes end up using youtube videos for
instruction, having a small "HD" screen I could have in vision while I'm doing
that would be incredibly useful, or the ability to pull up a shell and view
some text wherever I am (server misbehaving or whatever).

That's something I'd pay £300 for.

------
dsr_
This is still too wedded to the idea of "apps" and a modern smartphone
environment. Try something really different:

A seawaterproof, dust-proof, shock-resistant aluminum-magnesium alloy
cylinder. A lanyard hole on top and another on the bottom.

No display.

No headphone jack.

No SMS, no wireless data system.

A USB port under a lid.

A camera with a physical viewfinder and one button: when you press it, it
takes a picture. No review, no fancy filters.

A speaker and a microphone.

A big battery. Three or four days of moderate use.

Two more buttons: GO and STOP. No keypad, no directional keys.

The interface is voice based. Tap GO, say "Call Fred". It slurps your contact
database from your iPhone or Android, whatever you use the rest of the time.
When it rings, you can hit GO to accept the call or STOP to send it to your
other phone, where it can go to your normal voicemail.

It doesn't play games. It has a few minor features, all under voice command:
"Set alarm 6 AM", "Timer on" "Lap", "Timer off", "What time is it?".

You can recharge it via the USB port, you can mount it as a drive and send off
the photos, you can upload a new contact list. The battery is replaceable.
Four band GSM with a SIM card next to the battery. You can use it anywhere
except Antarctica.

Selling points: it keeps working, longer and in harsher conditions than you
want to take any black mirror. You can use it one-handed without looking at
it. Take it with you jogging, rock climbing, or SCUBA diving. It doesn't look
like a phone, so it's not an automatic theft target. In a rough situation you
can hit someone with it and expect it to work afterwards.

James Bond would carry one, if he and it existed.

~~~
jbigelow76
I've never thought HN was missing the ability to post images as responses. But
this one time...

[http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/The...](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHomer.png/revision/latest?cb=20090908145331)
:)

------
dasil003
The smart phone category is now firmly established, and there's little room
for radical innovation. It's not a question of colonizing new niches—the
market trend has been exactly the opposite, the iPhone cannibalized entire
product categories by being good enough at so many things and then surpassing
them with the integration benefits. Sure there is room for innovation and
expansion into new niches, but those are small local maxima, nothing that is
revolutionize phones again.

If you realize what the smartphone means—literally the entire middle class
population with a powerful networked computer in their pocket—and where it
stands in the logical progress of computers from government to business to
home to the person, it's clear that the next revolution of this magnitude will
be nothing less than physical implants. Maybe there will be some intermediate
step like Google Glass, but just like smart watches it's very hard to beat the
utility of a phone in your pocket.

Other major innovations will happen, sure, but they will come out of
unexpected areas and solve new problems. The OA seems to be nostalgic for the
pace of innovation of the last 8 years, but that time is over now, smartphones
will continue to improve incrementally but the low-hanging fruit for
reinventing them is pretty well harvested. Even if someone comes up with a
fundamentally better mobile paradigm than iOS it's probably impossible to
overcome the network and polish effects of a decade of Apple and Google
pouring their entire essence into their respective mobile platforms.

------
mrpebbles
What the author and other commenters are alluding to imo are niche markets at
a shot of winning. Most hard working americans DONT need a 2nd phone. If you
want to be a niche player then fine make an adventure phone, but no shot thats
going mass market to defeat iphone. And what the author is forgetting ,
missing is its not just about the Iphone in regards to apple but Its the
ENTIRE seamless Ecosystem. Thats why apple is winning !

------
thesteg
At least from my point of view, the perceived value of the iPhone increases
with each additional device and service of Apple you use. I recently had the
opportunity to test a Samsung: While the device itself was great, I didn't
even try to get my music or photos synced. I'm so used of Apple flawless
integration with each other. That's the challenge.

------
bitcuration
Beat iPhone? Get in line bro as its a loooong line.

All my banking/credit card apps on iPhone turned into Touch ID based starting
this year. Last year this time I had to go through a battle to convince my
fellow corporate colleague that the Touch ID is not some scary security breach
wannabe like those found in androids.

This is what apple always do and still very good at, show the world how to
turn technology into improving quality of average man's life, though far less
than what men have hoped and so far is the only one who has manage to pull it
off.

What Microsoft, IBM have done at most to affect people's work life, but
nowhere near what Apple has done.

The rest of industry would be much better off if simple watch and learn. There
is this mindset that's still light year ahead from what most have perceived.

~~~
Oletros
> the Touch ID is not some scary security breach wannabe like those found in
> androids.

I suppose that you will provide some examples of those security breachs

~~~
ceejayoz
[http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/a-billion-android-
ph...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/a-billion-android-phones-are-
vulnerable-to-new-stagefright-bugs/)

~~~
Oletros
Now tell me what has to do Stagefright with the implication that Google Play
is not secure as the OP did.

Or are you just posting the first thing you find in Google withouts knowing
what it means?

~~~
ceejayoz
I don't see anything in OP's post specific to Google Play. Did they edit?

------
atarian
The most glaring problem with the iPhone and other smartphones is battery
life. So if you want to beat the iPhone, build a smartphone that is comparable
to the iPhone but can last a week or more on battery.

~~~
otterley
There's nothing wrong with the iPhone's battery life - the problem is more
likely where you use it. Almost any phone's battery will last for days in a
place where cell site antennas are dense and close enough to provide
connectivity without making the radio work very hard.

I was surprised to find how much battery I had left at the end of the day in a
major Indian city, as opposed to in San Francisco. One or two bars of signal
strength may be enough to make your phone useful, but it's no good for one's
battery life.

Recall that the radio power-to-distance function is logarithmic.

------
Animats
Their suggested two-phone solution makes sense. Carriers should offer plans
where you can have two phones, one of which might be a tablet, with the same
phone number for the price of one, as long as you don't use them both at the
same time. For incoming calls, both ring, if turned on. You shouldn't need a
"cloud service" like Grand Central/Google Voice for this, just an arrangement
with the carrier.

This is a solution to the "fat phone" problem - the things are just getting
too big.

~~~
humanrebar
...or just promote tethering as a first-class feature and charge per GB of
data.

~~~
voltagex_
It's _sort of_ here in (surprisingly) Australia.

[https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-
rates/sha...](https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-rates/share-
your-data)

[http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-
sharing](http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-sharing)

------
l1feh4ck
I would like to have a fully modular phone. Where i can change or add hardware
capabilities (like fairphone) . More hardware freedom.

------
draw_down
Why does the iPhone need to be "beaten" in the first place?

~~~
gtk40
I feel like some of the points he raises in the article answer that question.
The one most compelling to me from the article is that I would like something
more rugged and usable for hiking, biking, skiing, etc. than the current types
of smartphones.

~~~
draw_down
I think it's really unfocused. It does talk about (perceived) shortcomings of
the iPhone, but then it goes on to talk about complementing the iPhone instead
of competing with it.

But even if it actually were about beating the iPhone, my question stands.
It's an extremely popular product with very high customer satisfaction
ratings. We as consumers should be so lucky to have an analogue in other
market sectors.

If only, say, cars had the same problem. Or televisions, or shoes, or or or...

------
Oletros
> Everybody seems content chasing the iPhone

I think that he starts with a wrong hypothesis

