Now that the smartphone is old hat, Jon Honeyball looks forward to a new era of computing
We are moving into the post-smartphone era. That might come as a shock to you, but the smartphone has had a decent run – depending of course on what you call a “smartphone”. For most of us, the category was kicked off by the iPhone well over a decade ago: its full-face touchscreen and rich software ecosystem have simply transformed the world.
Those with long memories might hark back to devices such as the Nokia Communicator or the Palm Treo, while others might pin their flags to the Android pole, but it’s indisputable that Apple has done more with the smartphone platform than anyone else. In particular, it’s almost single-handedly ushered in the successor phase of personal technology: the age of wearables.
For me, the Apple Watch has been as transformative as the phone itself. Over the past few years it’s gone from a wrist-worn curiosity to an integral part of my portable communications toolkit – so much so that if I leave it at home in the morning by mistake, I will drive back to get it.
Who’s that smirking at the back? I’m being entirely serious. I make many of my phone calls through my watch, and do much of my messaging and email browsing there too. It took some initial time and thought to set up the watch face for quick access to these features, but now that’s done it’s far easier to glance at my wrist than to pull the phone from my trouser pocket. I know some PC Pro colleagues swear by their Android smartwatches, but in my experience they simply don’t manage the trick of making 2+2=5.
Needless to say, the march of evolution doesn’t stop here. The ongoing chatter about VR and AR systems is growing louder and more widespread. VR has been around for ages, of course, without really going mainstream – even Sony’s VR headset for the PlayStation has never struck populist gold. But then there’s an essential problem with VR: you immerse yourself in a virtual world to the exclusion of everything else. That works well when you’re on the sofa playing a 3 D game, but falls down when you need togo to the fridge to get another beer, and collapses entirely when it’s time to drive to the shops.
AR has a far better chance of gaining public traction, because it lets you reap the benefits of connected technology while remaining in contact with the real world. There are still issues to be overcome, however. One is portability: a typical VR headset is big enough to accommodate essential components like batteries, or if you need more power, you can alweys run a tether cable back to a base unit – after all, VR users aren’t likely to be wandering any great distance.
It’s much harder to design a practical AR device. Yes, you can use AR capabilities on a phone or tablet, and that’s useful because it expands the range of use cases, but ideally you want something that you can wear on your person at all times. This means it has to be light enough not to impose on your movement, and discreet enough to fit seamlessly into your everyday life, while still being able to do a useful job for the wearer, and to store enough power to carry on working for a reasonable period between charges.
One solution might be to integrate AR into a pair of headphones. This would allow for advanced binaural audio support, with mountings for cameras on the headband and extra space for batteries. Or, such a device could use a small tether cable to a battery and CPU lump that you can store in a pocket. It would also need high-speed networking to your smartphone, assuming this remains the core of the portable information network, but this should be possible with high frequency wireless working as a personal pico-cell.
Even if such a design can be made to work, there are deeper questions that need addressing. What are we actually going to do with AR? Will the combination of smartphone, smartwatch and smart glasses ever achieve the promise of 2+2+2=9?
What are we actually going to do with AR? Will the combination of smartphone, smartwatch and smart glasses ever achieve the promise of 2+2+2=9?
As yet we have few answers. Microsoft has been beavering away on its VR/AR HoloLens system for more than five years now, but hasn’t so far delivered anything mainstream. Apple is reportedly also working on an AR product, but it’s unclear what form it might take. On the plus side, the company’s powerful AR Kit framework is already powering a wide range of iOS apps.
That’s not enough though. If AR is to work, it has to work across the whole spread of of devices. Maybe Apple will make 2+2+2 equal 9, but will that magic calculus be available to everyone? It would be a true step forward if the next era transcended manufacturers’ ecosystems; I’m not holding my breath.