I guess I'm not really talking about it from a business-centric perspective, but rather one of progress. This is where I feel the next step in mobile computing lies, given these advancements in mobile CPU. But you're right, perhaps it does not make business sense, and that's why we're not seeing it.
The reasons this will never happen has nothing to do with the technical challenges, but rather the business implications.
What business is going to invest in creating commoditized platform? Certainly not Apple or Samsung, they are busy figuring out new ways to lock consumers into their ecosystem. So it has to be a new entry into the mobile market.
Perhaps a company like IBM has the resources to build the base platform. (This is certainly beyond a kick starter). But, why would an IBM invest in creating a commodity platform? How does an open hardware platform serve their, or any other business', interests? It doesn't, and that's the real reason that we won't see a system like this.
"It's open" is not and has never been an effective selling point for consumer products, and it seems that you're effectively trying to sell these things to consumers. "It's open and is better is," and in my experience that rarely exists (again, for consumer products). If it is as easy as you posit (and this isn't my field, I know a little about CPUs and GPUs but mobile isn't really relevant to me), then what's stopping a company with significant talent and cash reserves can appropriate the same approaches and lap you with their closed tech? I don't see how you're not going to have to offer an inferior good at superior-good prices.
Technically speaking, if anything, phones strike me as a harder place to enter, due to the limitations on power budget and the significant premium on marginal performance. I'm not saying it can't be built--I'm saying, who would both want it and not benefit from business-as-usual, closed development?
It seems like you're saying there is no more room for innovation/paradigm shifts in handheld computing. Do you really think that's true? Phones will be more or less the same as they are now forever?
Exactly - I've been trying to think of what could pivot the market, and unless someone makes substantial breakthroughs in battery life (and has the budget and PR clout to convey it) and can make it substantially cheaper and subjectively better, it's not going to move the needle much.
No. It's the willingness of manufacturers to make it possible.
We could have had this many years ago already. The technology was there, the performance was there, it's just that the willingness of phone manufacturers to enable users to do it was lacking and still is for the most part.
Probably because there's not that much demand for it either, outside of techie circles.
It's hard to imagine we won't get there eventually though. For the time being, there really aren't great options, but that will certainly change in the coming years. Mobile remains in its infancy.
What would a real competitor? The gap is closing, has closed in any meaningful way. I use a phone with a 7nm processor and won't be upgrading anytime soon.
Consider that smart phones have only been around for a little more than a decade. It took several decades of development for general-purpose computers to become viable to the mainstream, so the smart-phone technology is just in its infancy.
While the battery consumption issues are definitely a problem, progress is being made to curb them:
Really we need innovation in the hardware space in addition to less bloated and more refined APIs. Perhaps more efficient Virtual Machine layers that sit on top of the OS layer. Or even get rid of those entirely and force C++ only, but then the precious security sandbox is gone. In any case, it seems a lot of the OS changes being made are feature-driven more than anything. They are trying to compete on features instead of stabilizing and refining the core. Or, maybe we need a new mobile OS design and some open hardware to support it. Personally, I think BB10 had a lot going for it with QNX and C++ APIs, but because they don't have the precious "apps" consumers demanded it became even more bloated with the sluggish android runtime.
What's more, Device manufacturers push higher-resolution displays and faster CPUs and GPUs--all things that impact battery life. But why not improve upon these gradually while bolstering battery life instead? Consumers won't buy it that's the problem and hardware manufacturers just want to sell units to satisfy shareholders.
The problem is no different than the junk-food industry: consumers don't know what's best for themselves or what they need, yet they develop strong opinions about what they want and companies, hungry for market share meet those demands.
> If you feel an urge to "start from scratch" — help rebuild everything for mobile.
Given that mobile hardware is about where desktop hardware was when BeOS was invented, I wonder if some company could use it as a new smartphone OS. There's an unfinished ARM port in progress but would probably need commercial support to complete.
The thing about innovation is, it's not always possible to predict what will be valuable or not. Not many people would have predicted Linux back in Linus's early days, for example.
The reason I've seen for the phone hardware is that they simply can't source hardware that is more performant but still open enough to sufficiently develop for.
maybe there is not need for such ambition. Seems like cell phone companies are developing for the sake of development because they're dependent on the release cycle to make money.
I am surprised no one introduced yet a CPU and phone which has little if any GPU and called it a business phone. The obvious advantages include security, cost, power consumption.
At least in the U.S., the real problem is the billing model. Those kind of incremental improvements will be nice but that doesn’t seem like enough to justify more than a gradual upgrade since most people won’t see much benefit other than a few edge cases — how many people are going to buy a new phone so they can get online slightly faster when their subway car approaches a new tower?
Every other application, especially the cool ones like AR/VR which do seem plausible for people dropping a lot of cash, will be constrained by the enormous markup on data well before it hits the limits of LTE. Fewer milliseconds on handoff could be nice but it’s hard to think of an application which can’t buffer but is going to fit within a few GB per month.
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