Is the nightmare rectangle fad BAD?
'Nightmare rectangle' is the funniest term for a smartphone I've heard.
As a civilisation we've dreamed of magical devices with the capabilities of these things for ... maybe... forever. When I was a kid, I used to daydream what the future would be like, and I would get a recurring vision of people walking through a corridor in a shopping centre in the evening peak, perhaps walking to an underground train station. In my vision, people weren't looking around at each other or even in front of them, but down, at these little flat rectangular devices in their hands. The devices would display whatever people wanted to see, whether the news, weather, or whatever else. My vision didn't show me any closeups and I assumed the devices were like televisions broadcasting a display of information relevant to the location rather than being fully interactive. Perhaps this future was inevitable, since it was so clear and vivid in my imagination almost two decades before it happened.
But now we're stuck with devices that are everything we ever dreamed of... given to us in the most nightmarish form imaginable. Do you know those nightmares you sometimes get where nothing is overly terrifying, but there are a few annoyances chipping away at your resolve and preventing you from doing what you need to do?
On the ergonomics of glass rectangles...
Smartphones have utterly horrible ergonomics. They're not ... built... for human conditions. We have changed the way we live to accomodate them, it should always have been the other way around.
- It's made of glass.
- Humans are made to move in all sorts of ways. If you try to move in too many sorts of ways with a smartphone in your pocket, it will fall out and your whole week will be ruined.
- Humans are rugged and reliant. We've evolved to withstand tough conditions. If there's a river blocking your path, you can cross it. Except now we're living in the age of having to always be mindful of having a fragile item in your pocket that can't get wet, can't get dropped, can't get bumped too roughly, and so on. The potential fun you can have outdoors is now limited by the amount of fun tht will lead to the rectangular glass artifact in your pocket getting cracked or wet. For the first time in history.
- Bit by bit, we have ended up unconciously holding ourselves back in ways we never did before. People used to push each other into swimming pools for fun. People used to jump over locked gates at parks without fear of the expensive rectangle falling out and cracking on the ground.
- They have tiny bezels around a sensive touch screen that does unpredictable stuff if touch the screen without meaning to. You have to master the art of holding it delicately by its edges (most of us now do so without thinking) when you might be in the middle of a large crowd. Humans are tactile beings. We like to grab things and hold them securely in our hands. This is almost a subtle form of torture.
- A smartphone requires clean hands. Think of all the messy hobbies that have fallen into decline because people can't get their hands dirty if they're expecting a call? With old analog landline phones you had a big chunky receiver to pick up and hold next to your face. It didn't matter if your hands were covered in unfired clay or paint or potting mix or soaked in water, your phone would still function perfectly well. A modern smart phone requires you do do a delicate swiping action from just the right part of the screen and you get a few brief seconds to do so before your important call goes to voicemail.
- The idea of being interrupted wherever you are at an unexpected and completely random time by a ringing phone, no matter what you're busy with or whether or not you have your hands full or how delicate the task you're engaged in or how focused your concentration, is another subtle form of torture.
- They're not bad in sunlight as far as LCD screens go, but they're not that great in sunlight either. Last time I left my phone on a table outdoors on a sunny day, it got extremely hot and Android gave me a battery overheating warning.
- They disturb sleep. Because every time you get into that state of partially waking up, making sure you're safe in your surroundings, and then drifting off to sleep again, you just have to pick up your phone to make sure there's no important notifications, don't you? That puts you into a full waking state. We didn't evolve to wake up fully between episodes of sleep since that was never necessary for us to fully assess our surroundings until now.
- You have to watch that charge level otherwise you might not be able to pay a public transport fare, or pay for groceries, or check in to a venue, or unlock a shopping trolley (QR codes to unlock shopping trolleys were trialled at a supermarket near me but they dropped it once they realised half the shoppers were refusing to use their new system, and were instead picking up the little plastic courtesy baskets and buying fewer groceries. I saw some hilarious altercations between frustrated shoppers and weary supermarket staff during the trial period though).
- In a crowded place, in a potentially volatile situation, your situational awareness of your immediate surroundings goes out the window as soon as you try to search for information about a happening situation on your phone.
How could the future have been instead?
I like my Kindle. It has an e-ink screen that doesn't emit light, doesn't display colour graphics, and doesn't handle animated content at all. Leaving aside the fact that the operating system doesn't give you the freedom and flexibility you would want from a typical mobile computing device, it has the bones of a brilliant mobile computing device.
The battery lasts for a very long time (several days) because the display is not energy intensive. The display does not emit light so it doesn't foster a culture of checking the display at night time when you ought to be sleeping. Therefore it doesn't foster the creeping expectation of being online at all hours. The e-ink display is also perfect in outdoor conditions. The graphics aren't fluid but when you're living life to the full, you need situational awareness of the movement around you (awesome), not animated transitions on an LCD screen (sad).
The other good thing about my kindle is that nobody can use it to interrupt whetever I'm in the middle of. I use it when I want to and that's it. Now that's the kind of computing device I wish we carried around in our pockets.
Now for the literal-minded people reading this rant, I'm obviously not implying that a Kindle would make a good a drop-in replacement for a smart phone, but perhaps lo-fi low energy devices with displays that handle outdoor conditions well and have big bezels we can grab onto are a good alternative niche direction we could explore as mainstream technology hurtles onwards.
The USB-C connector
AND ANOTHER THING! the USB-C connector that has now been mandated by the EU for all phones is stupid. Maybe that's a bit harsh. I take it back. It's a good connector which is not suitable for years of daily insertions and removals out in the field. Even with the best of care, the port eventually wears out (the cables do too) and then you need to lean the plug in a certain way to charge your phone.
Somewhere there's a parallel universe where people have full sized chunky USB-A ports on their phones and although their phones are a few millimeters thicker, they never have to replace their phones due to a worn out charging port.
Usually it's just dirt inside the port
USB-C ports are dirt magnets and dirt, dust and lint affect the functionality of the port. Although delicate, there's a trick to cleaning them without damaging them as follows.
To clean out a USB-C port, grab a wooden toothpick. Don't insert the toothpick straight into the port, it's too fat and you might snap something inside. First squeeze the last centimetre of the toothpick between a pair of pliers to flatten it out. Then it will be narrow enough to fit without wedging against the contacts. Very carefully use the flattened out toothpick to scoop out pieces of lint. When the end of the toothpick starts to fray and break, discard it and grab another toothpick; you're trying to get stuff out of your port not add splintered bits of toothpick to the mess. Once you have the big pieces out, dip a fresh flattened-out toothpick end in methylated spirits (rubbing alcohol) and rub it against the contacts inside the port to clean the contacts. Repeat all these steps in whatever order feels right as many times as needed until the port is clean.
'I've never had this problem with my cable'
A lot of people anecdotally say that if you aren't loving your USB-C experience, it means you aren't using a high quality cable; and that (usually) it's only non-Apple people who don't have genuine Apple cables who run into trouble. This reasoning is worrysome as far as judging the standard goes, because it implies an invisible borderline between cables that get temperamental and cables that remain good. MicroUSB had this problem too, as did some of the old ad-hoc phone charger plugs that different vendors used to use. (And for the record, premium grade USB-C cables and sockets go bad too, it just hasn't happened to those making those anecdotes just yet.) There's no delicate borderline between a 'quality' and potential-dud cables when it comes to standards like USB-A, or going back further, older standards like PS/2, parallel printer cables, or even mains power sockets.