“Do not rush to bury us”: the second life of technology
Technological progress is often considered a movement in a straight line - but in fact humanity often returns to what it had previously ignored, confirming the adage about the “well forgotten old.” To take at least three-dimensionality: cinemas with a proud sign "Stereokino" and stereoscopic photography, having appeared a long time ago, could hardly attract anyone seriously at that time - and then returned with a much larger scale.
Does this mean that people are stupid and do not notice for a long time what wonderful technologies they have at their disposal? No, it's just that these technologies need time to become truly attractive. Today's 3D cinemas give a much more impressive picture than their "grandfathers", and smartphones like HTC EVO 3D allow you to take a picture and instantly see its entire volume on the screen without using glasses - which is much more convenient than messing around with a stereoscope.
Now, right before our eyes, they find their second (and, most likely, main) life a few more things.
After the transition from resistive screens to capacitive ones, it seemed that the children of the future would be surprised to ask, “Daddy, did you poke the screen with your wand? And why? ”, As now sometimes they ask in surprise“ Only a half a megabyte fit into the diskette? Why did you use them, this is inconvenient. ” HTC was one of the first to take the path away from the stylus, launching the Touch smartphone in 2007: it added its own TouchFLO interface to the Windows Mobile system, allowing you to conveniently control your finger.
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However, when this year the company supplied the Flyer tablet with the Magic Pen stylus, journalists called the accessory one of the tablet’s main strengths (as formulated in Engadget, “both practical and fun”). It turned out that this is a great device - you just need not force the user to do everything for them, but reduce its role to handwriting and drawing, where fingers cannot make any competition. Other companies now also show an active interest in the stylus, so, apparently, we will meet them more than once.
Front cameras on the phones are not new at all; a few years ago they could be found even in models of the middle price segment, which do not pretend to any “smartphone”. But the boom of video calls they did not cause, and as a result, top-end smartphones did without a front-facing camera, and their operating systems did not even have its support. One would think that this would remain necessary only for Italians suffering without gesticulation. But now for several reasons (for example, Skype came to the phones, which already assembled an army of video chat enthusiasts) the situation changed on all fronts: Android began to support front cameras with version 2.3, iOS from 4.0, and for a good smartphone this function became a matter of honor.
Windows Phone 7 took more time, but with the Mango update it will provide an opportunity to demonstrate themselves to the interlocutors - and in the newly announced WP7-smartphones HTC Titan and Radar you can see the front camera eyes next to the voice speakers.
The mobile fashion industry has come to MP3 players in its time, for example, iRiver in 2004 released the iFP-1090 model with a retractable camera. The rapid success did not accompany her: the phone quality of the pictures was higher, the screens were better suited for looking at photos, you could put a picture on a contact or send it to MMS - in general, it was not clear why a person could need a camera in an MP3 player, if it is already in the mobile phone, and many said "it will never become popular."
Later, players began to use to watch the video, and the big screens that came with it played into the picture (to see you better in the picture, granddaughter) and large memories (so that more pictures fit). In addition, such players with large screens cost more, while photomodules in the meantime fell in price, and the presence of a camera ceased to noticeably affect the price - then why do without it? The next step happened when players like “like a smartphone, just not calling” appeared - and if you can upload photos on the social network directly from them or send them to a friend by mail, then you can do without a camera in a completely bad manner. In general, skeptical forecasts turned out to be untenable: even if the presence of the camera in the players has not yet become so ubiquitous as in the phones, it’s impossible to say “it has not become popular”.
On the one hand, motorists wanted to use all the advantages of computers in a car — choose their favorite music from a huge music library, use the Internet (from Google Maps to check email), and at least work on the sidelines if necessary. On the other hand, it was not clear how to make it all so convenient: yes, the monitors learned how to build in sun canopies, and hide the system unit in the trunk, but choosing the right song out of a thousand was still more problematic than poking in the radio number on the radio. Because of this, CarPC with Windows remained the lot of individual enthusiasts, and it seemed that the average person would always miss the standard radio and GPS navigator. But in the end, progress went a different way: first, the infotainment systems began to evolve (recall Android in E-Mobile), and, secondly, drivers simply began using smartphones and tablets as a “car computer” ( and manufacturers went to meet them and began to make special interfaces like the HTC Car Panel ).
If you take the same HTC Flyer, the only serious drawback will be the inability to control blindly (however, tapping a couple of times on the screen waiting for the green light is anyway much easier than climbing folders in Windows), but everything else is great: the screen size is optimal for a car, navigation software is easy to find, a lot of music will fit in, the built-in Internet will check the traffic in a traffic jam - and at the same time, after spending money, you acquire a device not only for a car (as it was with CarPC), but for the rest of your life.
Here the situation was similar to the car: I wanted to get computer capabilities on a large television screen (storing a lot of video files, access to YouTube and other video hosting sites, the same email check), but it was not clear how to do it conveniently. Some people connected the system blocks, sat on Facebook via the Xbox 360, bought expensive video players and copied the video collection into them from a computer - but all this was connected with too many problems to interest the mass consumer. Even Google, creating a large-scale project Google TV, could not attract buyers.
From a dead center, the matter has moved: more and more “Smart TV” appears, including some “computer” functions - from playing video from a flash drive to convenient access to online video services like YotaPlay. Moreover, like motorists, fans of watching TV started using smartphones and tablets for this: some of them can be connected to a TV via HDMI, and HTC went even further and included DLNA technology in their new models, which allows you to transfer video to a TV without wires.
There is no doubt that in the future, in addition to completely new developments, suddenly something of which we already know will flourish. What exactly from the technologies that are currently in low demand, in your opinion, can “shoot” after improvement? Voice recognition when it becomes possible to dictate a poem to a smartphone while standing in a traffic jam; augmented reality, when she learns to suggest “it’s better not to get involved with this person,” or something completely different?
phillennium
Does this mean that people are stupid and do not notice for a long time what wonderful technologies they have at their disposal? No, it's just that these technologies need time to become truly attractive. Today's 3D cinemas give a much more impressive picture than their "grandfathers", and smartphones like HTC EVO 3D allow you to take a picture and instantly see its entire volume on the screen without using glasses - which is much more convenient than messing around with a stereoscope.
Now, right before our eyes, they find their second (and, most likely, main) life a few more things.
Stylus
After the transition from resistive screens to capacitive ones, it seemed that the children of the future would be surprised to ask, “Daddy, did you poke the screen with your wand? And why? ”, As now sometimes they ask in surprise“ Only a half a megabyte fit into the diskette? Why did you use them, this is inconvenient. ” HTC was one of the first to take the path away from the stylus, launching the Touch smartphone in 2007: it added its own TouchFLO interface to the Windows Mobile system, allowing you to conveniently control your finger.
')
However, when this year the company supplied the Flyer tablet with the Magic Pen stylus, journalists called the accessory one of the tablet’s main strengths (as formulated in Engadget, “both practical and fun”). It turned out that this is a great device - you just need not force the user to do everything for them, but reduce its role to handwriting and drawing, where fingers cannot make any competition. Other companies now also show an active interest in the stylus, so, apparently, we will meet them more than once.
Video calls
Front cameras on the phones are not new at all; a few years ago they could be found even in models of the middle price segment, which do not pretend to any “smartphone”. But the boom of video calls they did not cause, and as a result, top-end smartphones did without a front-facing camera, and their operating systems did not even have its support. One would think that this would remain necessary only for Italians suffering without gesticulation. But now for several reasons (for example, Skype came to the phones, which already assembled an army of video chat enthusiasts) the situation changed on all fronts: Android began to support front cameras with version 2.3, iOS from 4.0, and for a good smartphone this function became a matter of honor.
Windows Phone 7 took more time, but with the Mango update it will provide an opportunity to demonstrate themselves to the interlocutors - and in the newly announced WP7-smartphones HTC Titan and Radar you can see the front camera eyes next to the voice speakers.
Camera in mp3 player
The mobile fashion industry has come to MP3 players in its time, for example, iRiver in 2004 released the iFP-1090 model with a retractable camera. The rapid success did not accompany her: the phone quality of the pictures was higher, the screens were better suited for looking at photos, you could put a picture on a contact or send it to MMS - in general, it was not clear why a person could need a camera in an MP3 player, if it is already in the mobile phone, and many said "it will never become popular."
Later, players began to use to watch the video, and the big screens that came with it played into the picture (to see you better in the picture, granddaughter) and large memories (so that more pictures fit). In addition, such players with large screens cost more, while photomodules in the meantime fell in price, and the presence of a camera ceased to noticeably affect the price - then why do without it? The next step happened when players like “like a smartphone, just not calling” appeared - and if you can upload photos on the social network directly from them or send them to a friend by mail, then you can do without a camera in a completely bad manner. In general, skeptical forecasts turned out to be untenable: even if the presence of the camera in the players has not yet become so ubiquitous as in the phones, it’s impossible to say “it has not become popular”.
Car computerization
On the one hand, motorists wanted to use all the advantages of computers in a car — choose their favorite music from a huge music library, use the Internet (from Google Maps to check email), and at least work on the sidelines if necessary. On the other hand, it was not clear how to make it all so convenient: yes, the monitors learned how to build in sun canopies, and hide the system unit in the trunk, but choosing the right song out of a thousand was still more problematic than poking in the radio number on the radio. Because of this, CarPC with Windows remained the lot of individual enthusiasts, and it seemed that the average person would always miss the standard radio and GPS navigator. But in the end, progress went a different way: first, the infotainment systems began to evolve (recall Android in E-Mobile), and, secondly, drivers simply began using smartphones and tablets as a “car computer” ( and manufacturers went to meet them and began to make special interfaces like the HTC Car Panel ).
If you take the same HTC Flyer, the only serious drawback will be the inability to control blindly (however, tapping a couple of times on the screen waiting for the green light is anyway much easier than climbing folders in Windows), but everything else is great: the screen size is optimal for a car, navigation software is easy to find, a lot of music will fit in, the built-in Internet will check the traffic in a traffic jam - and at the same time, after spending money, you acquire a device not only for a car (as it was with CarPC), but for the rest of your life.
TV computerization
Here the situation was similar to the car: I wanted to get computer capabilities on a large television screen (storing a lot of video files, access to YouTube and other video hosting sites, the same email check), but it was not clear how to do it conveniently. Some people connected the system blocks, sat on Facebook via the Xbox 360, bought expensive video players and copied the video collection into them from a computer - but all this was connected with too many problems to interest the mass consumer. Even Google, creating a large-scale project Google TV, could not attract buyers.
From a dead center, the matter has moved: more and more “Smart TV” appears, including some “computer” functions - from playing video from a flash drive to convenient access to online video services like YotaPlay. Moreover, like motorists, fans of watching TV started using smartphones and tablets for this: some of them can be connected to a TV via HDMI, and HTC went even further and included DLNA technology in their new models, which allows you to transfer video to a TV without wires.
There is no doubt that in the future, in addition to completely new developments, suddenly something of which we already know will flourish. What exactly from the technologies that are currently in low demand, in your opinion, can “shoot” after improvement? Voice recognition when it becomes possible to dictate a poem to a smartphone while standing in a traffic jam; augmented reality, when she learns to suggest “it’s better not to get involved with this person,” or something completely different?
phillennium
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/128101/
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