Are we Ready to Move Away From Smartphones?
Fresh off the back of a fairly hectic year in 2023, both technologically and otherwise, a rather surprising question has arisen around our daily use of one particular form of tech; the humble smartphone.
Despite smartphones being the standard for consumer mobile technology for only the past decade or so, already there are calls from certain corners of the industry for humanity to move away from them.
How, you ask? Well the good people at Humane have developed the Ai Pin — a piece of wearable technology that performs all the same functions as a smartphone, but without the need for a screen and the bulky design that comes with it.
In a market so completely dominated by largely homogenous smartphones — the only main difference being the OS they run — it will take a very compelling offering to overhaul this.
One of the main ways Humane has differentiated themselves from smartphones is the elimination of applications as the main source of user activity and information consumption. The Ai Pin runs “Ai Experiences” which are housed on the device itself, or in the cloud, so there is no need for third-party applications as we know them to be developed and downloaded for it.
If these prove successful, it could change how everyone from fashion retailers to TV broadcasters share their content with mobile users.
Needless to say that this could have huge implications for the software development scene too. Applications have been the main source of information and user activity since smartphones became the norm and they have created an entire industry of their own.
This means that agencies and in-house developers would have to move away from mobile app development and into developing said “Ai Experiences”.
What strikes me about this, is that the Ai Pin is almost taking the agency (in the other sense of the word) and flexible functionality that smartphones provide away from the user. They are channeling all of the functions through predetermined methods of communication, media intake, and more.
For example, if the vast majority of your messaging is done on Whatsapp — and that includes all of the photos, videos, voice notes, etc, you’ve got in that stored history — then presumably you would lose all of this if you moved entirely to the Ai Pin? If not, how could it be forwarded on in future if we so desired, and how can videos and photos be sent and viewed as easily as they are now?
One of the best things about using a variety of messaging apps is that you can use their individual features to punctuate your messages and the emotions behind them.
The Ai Pin seems to take this away somewhat, despite the presenter in the video penning a message of “I’ll be there later tonight” with his Ai Pin attached and then prompting it to “make me sound more excited”, and the Pin reciprocating with the wildly unoriginal, tasteless addition of “can’t wait!” bolted on the end.
You can’t replace a phone with this, but a phone could replace that if the innovation happened the other way around.
Now, I’m certainly not the first person to discredit the AiPin as a viable solution to a (non-existent) problem, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. However, there is another similar piece of technology that’s on the horizon that does carve out its own space in the market, instead of trying to displace a well established one; the Rabbit R1.
The Rabbit R1 is not trying to be a phone’s replacement, but rather an auxiliary device that uses what’s known as a large action model (LAM) to hear the user’s commands, understand the context behind them, and then act upon them.
Where both of these devices are trying to simplify general phone uses — both using their keynote presentations to highlight the number of taps it takes to perform a particular task on a phone — the AiPin in particular requires even more gestures to make it work in the same way as a phone, but the Rabbit R1 seems to handle things a bit more smoothly.
However, it doesn’t seem to take into account much of what is appealing about a smartphone to the average consumer.
The issue is that using one of these devices assumes a level of trust in technology to the point where you’re happy to give it a command, and just sit back and let it happen.
In the Rabbit R1’s presentation with the Co-Founder, he asked it to plan an entire European holiday including flights, accommodation, and excursions, which is something that no one would allow their device to do for them unchecked.
Shopping around, finding the best available prices, and planning your trip accordingly is what any person would do, particularly if they have any sort of budget or time constraints, so it feels as though this is being targeted at people with far less price-sensitivity than the average consumer, despite the Rabbit R1 in particular costing a fraction of what a top of the range smartphone would.
In any case, smartphones have become far more than just communication devices. They are used as cameras, wallets, entertainment hubs, and personal assistants, meaning that transitioning away from them would require rethinking and redefining the role of technology in our lives — something that I don’t believe anyone is willing to do.
Whilst these devices will have a place in some people’s lives, in our opinion, they are both “one update away” businesses — meaning they are one Apple, Android, or application update away from being completely irrelevant.
