Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets
16th July 2010
Eric Raymond is always worth reading.
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. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger.
This raises an interesting question: what else is natural prey for the smartphones of the future?
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 have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.
Be sure to read the comments as well.