The Mobile Internet Is the Internet (qz.com) 156
A reader shares a Quartz report: Think back to the mobile phone you had in 2010. It could access the internet, but it wasn't such a great experience. On average, people only spent 20% of their time online on their phones back then, according to Zenith, a media agency. Today, by contrast, we spend around 70% of our time on the internet on phones, based on estimates and forecasts for more than 50 countries covering two-thirds of the world's population. By 2019, Zenith says this will rise to close to 80%. What used to be called "mobile internet" is now just the internet.
Mobile internet still sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
It just sucks less. I would still much rather sit in front of my computer if I have the opportunity where I have a much larger screen and a physical keyboard.
I would be interested to see if people are spending that much less time on their computers for internet browsing, or if they are just on the internet more because it's easier now to pull out your mobile phone when you're bored and check your favorite social media sites.
Re:Mobile internet still sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Young people seem better at using small screens and "thumb" keying such that the difference between a PC/netbook and phone is smaller to them. If you spend all your life peeping through keyholes, then you get good at using keyholes.
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Even the best thumb typists are still slower on a phone than they would be (given sufficient time to become proficient typists) on a proper keyboard, display, and desktop environment. Hunt'n'peck is still hunt'n'peck, even on a glass screen.
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Not just slower but less accurate and with the phone second guessing everything with predictive text. That leads to garbage like text speak, typos and incorrect word replacement.
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Agreed.
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As does employing indo-chimps like msmanishH1Beau.
Re: Mobile internet still sucks (Score:1)
What?
Predictive text is the best!
Watch I'll show you how the world can be made a better person and you will never get a chance to get to a brute that you have to pay to get the full version to play with your own words and the way the app does the job and the game will not work with all the games you have any other game with the app is very good at times but it's still fun and easy to play games and it is just a great game and you should get the game app to play games with you guys at the same point and they
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Even the best thumb typists are still slower on a phone than they would be (given sufficient time to become proficient typists) on a proper keyboard, display, and desktop environment. Hunt'n'peck is still hunt'n'peck, even on a glass screen.
Since "mobile internet usage" includes a lot of Candy Crush etc the inability to type text accurately is of secondary interest to most users.
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Young people seem better at using small screens and "thumb" keying such that the difference between a PC/netbook and phone is smaller to them. If you spend all your life peeping through keyholes, then you get good at using keyholes.
I suspect that you are right. There's an entire generation whose entire view of the Internet, and computers in general, has been through a 5 inch screen (or occasionally a 10 inch tablet).
When I'm doing anything computer or Internet related it's on a powerful desktop computer with a 27 inch monitor. And I'm seriously considering a 32 inch 4k monitor in the near future. I guess I'm just an old fart, but using a phone as a web browser/general purpose computer just seems really stupid.
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When I'm doing anything computer or Internet related it's on a powerful desktop computer with a 27 inch monitor.
Then what are you doing to pass the time while riding the bus or train to and from work?
Re:Mobile internet still sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd recommend relaxing. One doesn't always have to do things and learning to accept that is healthy.
Have to say that properly learning to relax/meditate isn't a waste of time - being able to think of the problems in ones life calmly without being stressed leads to better solutions in general.
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Then what are you doing to pass the time while riding the bus or train to and from work?
Boredom is not just something that happens to you, it is something that you do to yourself!
Don't do it, and you will not have a problem.
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Could you explain what steps one ought to take in order to avoid doing boredom to oneself? Or were you quoting a movie that I happen not to have seen?
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Could you explain what steps one ought to take in order to avoid doing boredom to oneself? Or were you quoting a movie that I happen not to have seen?
Not a movie, it's real.
Notice that people who complain about being bored, are usually somwewhat young, older people have learned what to do.
The tecniques are about noticing what is around you, and using what is already is in your mind.
The first involves looking carefully at your surroundings to see what might be interesting. If that is not enough, try something like looking for snipers who are trying to get a shot at you. Doesn't matter if it is crazy, you don't have to tell anyone about it.
The second is to
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But does it work for (say) the 90 minute bus or train commute that some Slashdot users claim to have?
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But does it work for (say) the 90 minute bus or train commute that some Slashdot users claim to have?
Not all at once, but using various methods and finding something else when one stops working, yes.
It does get easier after practice, and I tend to never get bored anywhere.
Of course, it is also called "daydreaming" and "wasting time", so use it with care... 8-)
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You still need a device to play the music.
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Such a device doesn't need internet connectivity though
It does in order to avoid offline access surcharges. Streaming services like Pandora and Spotify charge extra per month for offline access, and services that don't charge per month charge on the order of $1.29 per track, which adds up fairly quickly.
it doesn't even need to be digital or computerized.
An analog player for use on the bus or train needs to be portable, which rules out vinyl and reel-to-reel. And Slashdot recently ran a story about it being hard to find blank cassettes in the 2010s [slashdot.org]. What portable analog recording medium does that leave?
Cost of building a music library (Score:2)
So the only way to acquire music or other material to listen to for entertainment is through streaming services and digital purchases? Riiiiiight. Countless hours of music on physical media all around the world, so abundant people build libraries of the stuff
I'm referring to the cost of "build[ing] libraries of the stuff." Since iTunes and Amazon MP3 became popular, how many people are willing to buy a $12.99 album for the one or two good songs on it?
God forbid someone takes it to the next level and decides to compose music intended to be listened and distribuited for free!
Say I were to go this route. What steps should I take to ensure that I'm not infringing someone's copyright by inadvertently making the melody of my piece of music too similar to that of a piece of music whose copyright someone else owns? See for example Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
it doesn't even need to be digital or computerized.
high capacity portable audio players that work completely offline - CD, flash memory and hard drive based.
Compact Disc Digital A
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Also you don't have to build a music library exclusively by iTunes or Amazon, cheaper alternatives are available.
Namely?
(I'm excluding methods that blatantly infringe copyright from the discussion because if I recommend them to someone, I could incur secondary liability for inducing infringement.)
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Indeed. Good luck downloading a linux iso on a phone.
Re:Mobile internet still sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
It may be quicker using 3 than using my "Professional" BT broadband. However, I have yet to find a way to burn CD images from my phone.
However, the reason why people spend far longer using the Internet from a phone is obvious: its the UI, stupid! It takes at least 3 times longer to do the same task on a phone as a PC because of the crap UIs.
Why can't I have Gnome2/Mate/fvwm95 on my phone? Hierarchical Drop down menus are a great idea. Stupid, unrecognisable Icons - not so good.
Imprecision of a finger (Score:3)
Why can't I have Gnome2/Mate/fvwm95 on my phone?
Imprecision of a finger as a pointing device, and general lack of demand among users for stylus-driven interfaces.
Hierarchical Drop down menus are a great idea. Stupid, unrecognisable Icons - not so good.
The menu philosophy of things like MATE and Xfce assumes that users can hit long, skinny targets. This is true of a mouse, where hit ease is related to area (w * h). It is not true of a finger, where hit ease is related to the shorter of the two dimensions (min(w, h)).
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It just sucks less.
[Citation Needed]
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This. Also way too many sites make you click through "get our app" messages constantly to use their site on a mobile device. Often the app is worse or at least no better in this age when there actually good mobile browsers -- and dang it, I don't want to install a new app for every site I view a few pages of from a Google search.
On far too many sites, the mobile version or app is feature-crippled compared to the desktop version of the site.
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But not on Slashdot, whose support for non-ASCII code points, such as U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, is intentionally incomplete.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Mobile Internet Is the Internet
If you are a consumer of crap, someone who lives their life of Facebook, than yes, your mobile phone is the Internet, the way you validate your sad little life.
Other people do other things "on the Internet" that do not revolve around Social Media.
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I am geniunely curious, how does your happy big life look that you allow yourself to patronize over most people?
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If you're genuinely curious, people who are casually happy generally care less about what other people think. Your theory seems to be that they worry more. No, those aren't happy people, those are the bland sheep that turn smiles outwards for you to view regardless of what is happening inside.
If somebody is happy and comfortable inside, they can just give you their real opinion, they don't need to be validated by your approval of their opinion, so if it is "patronizing" or not is just a distraction; they're
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Your theory seems to be that they worry more
I have no theory, I just asked a question.
If somebody is happy and comfortable inside, they can just give you their real opinion
Maybe if someone happy, he doesn't feel that urge to say his opinion all the time. I think that people that feel the need to state their opinion constantly usually have some problems (I am one of those people btw).
happy because they ignore those types of distractions
I agree that being able to concentrate is an important step on the way to happiness. I just don't understand how facebook is different from mobile games or television or any other form of background noise that grabs away people's attention. How is checking
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As someone who has been on the internet since even before 300baud acoustically coupled modems. I generally agree with the GPs sentiment. The Eternal September still has not ended. that being said. Things like FB have their place for the masses. I mostly despise ads. If anyone says that ads pay for the internet and if it stopped the internet would wither, I'd say good. The internet was just fine before X10 pioneered pop unders, the internet was vibrant before facebook, the internet used to be
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I doubt it - I was using ARPANET with 300baud acoustic couplers. However, I totally endorse the rest of your points.
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Most people aren't Facebook losers.
Most Americans are: 62% as of June 2017 [statista.com]
World-wide, penetration is growing but mostly limited by reliable internet access (hence the internet.org stuff).
I've been online since '92. I lament some of the changes as well. But bitterly walling yourself off from social media makes no sense and causes you to fail to understand the very real cultural issues that have been developing since then and how tech interacts with it.
I was geeky enough in '98 to still seek out Gopher nodes and lament poorly optimized table l
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And what does that cause?
I think Jay Sherman has this one nailed. [youtube.com]
Re: No. (Score:1)
Yeah, like looking at porn
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This might come as a shocker to you, but... Slashdot... is... social media...
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Oh good, we've rebranded AI, and now we've rebranded social media as "anything with a forum? "
I've been consuming / posting on slashdot for almost 20 years, and I don't and won't ever have an account. How is this social media exactly ?
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Oh good, we've rebranded AI, and now we've rebranded social media as "anything with a forum? "
I've been consuming / posting on slashdot for almost 20 years, and I don't and won't ever have an account. How is this social media exactly ?
Slashdot is as much social media as Twitter. People post comments, reply to comments, and so on. Whether I'm replying to user number 99999999 or AC is irrelevant, I don't know you either way.
I doubt many people using Twitter know the person they're communicating with in real life.
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Not really, Slashdot is a discussion forum.
See, the difference is social media is something you use to interact with your friends and family and share information.
A discussion forum is where you go to interact with a random cross section of assholes from the internet who ostensibly have some commonality based on an arbitrary article as a starting point.
They serve entirely different purposes.
Slashdot was doing its thing before socia
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See, the difference is social media is something you use to interact with your friends and family and share information.
It's not as black and white as that. People who post comments on Twitter or selfies on Instagram aren't generally talking to people they know in real life.
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Another thing. At home, do you choose a 5" or 36" screen? I choose the latter.
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At home, do you choose a 5" or 36" screen?
It depends on whether another member of the household has claimed use of the 36" screen before me.
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You are all cows. (Score:5, Funny)
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU 4G COWS!!
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I agree with Captain Cow.
Call me "old fashion" or "out of touch" but I don't own a smartphone or a laptop. What I do own is a desktop computer and a "feature phone". One stays plugged in all the time and the other needs charging every few weeks. If you cannot wait until you get to a computer terminal to access information then perhaps you should reconsider your priorities in life.
Listen to your elder... millennial. ;)
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I don't even own a computer. What I do own is a large library of manuscripts. If you cannot wait until monks scratch the information onto vellum then perhaps you should reconsider your priorities in life...
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Make the most of your commute with a laptop (Score:2)
If you cannot wait until you get to a computer terminal to access information then perhaps you should reconsider your priorities in life.
Someone with two jobs, one a day job in the office and the other working from home, may want to carry a laptop in order to work on the home job while riding public transit to and from the office.
Re:You are all cows. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you are definitely old fashioned and out of touch. :)
I did reconsider my priorities in life, and that's what lead to the smartphone. I have a 30 minute public transport commute each way to work. My priority was not being at work longer than I had to be, which lead me to consider making functional use of my commute. So now I zip off a half-dozen emails to and from work, and stay in the office an hour less each day.
I can also pop off early to the pub and have a beer, because I'm 5 seconds from being able to start responding to any emergency. Sure, being retired and not having to do that would be nice, but until then, it's incredible that I can have the bulk of the internet in my pocket running on a machine that's faster than a lot of the computers I built in my life.
Not having to spend a full workday on a floor filled with gray cubicles under fluorescent lights is definitely a good reason to get a smartphone in my opinion. YMMV, but as a large portion of my job is being an on-demand SME, doing that on a smartphone with a beer in my hand is only marginally harder than sitting at my computer. The only real problem is swype not knowing a lot of the technological jargon and abbreviations I have to use.
Re:You are all cows. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOOOO
MoooOO0OoO00Oo.
Personally I am really impressed with the technology. The capabilities of systems and networks of all shapes and sizes are still a source of amazement. Mobile especially. Tiny pocket sized computers with LTE, gigs of ram, quad core CPUs and GPUs, full HD displays. It's all rather amazing.
Yet here I am wasting all of that potential pretending to be a cow.
For me using a smartphone is like being stuck in a timewarp. So slow and tedious I completely lose track of time. What takes seconds in a laptop or PC takes minutes on a smartphone. It is not devices running slow but rather software and human interfaces that are laughably insufficient.. like frantically trying to suck enough water out of a straw to fill a swimming pool.
Now thanks to mobile all of the Internet is turning into a straw. Massive fonts, giant buttons, zero useful information and endless jackpot scrolling .. perhaps this is the screen that has information relevant to what I want... no let me try the next...nope not that one... ah ha!.....nope... false alarm...
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Yet here I am wasting all of that potential pretending to be a cow.
The same would apply to 99% of posts on the internet, whether from a phone or mainframe supercomputer.
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Very interesting. I don't make extensive use of my smartphone, but I've never felt that way about it. It's as snappy most of the time as my laptop is. Most pages I vew render just as fast, and email is actually more responsive than the Win 7 Outlook I have to use at work.
What do you do that takes so long?
More time, less useful (Score:5, Informative)
While I may spend more time on the mobile web -- reading news on the train, etc, it's still way less usable than my computer, so anytime I need more interaction with a site (i.e. purchasing an item, doing research on a subject where I want to reference several tabs, etc), I use my computer.
And I hate the responsive design trend that gives me a watered down experience with functionality either hidden or completely removed from the mobile experience.
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Zooming causes problems for shitty web developers that hard-code page widths and don't understand the need to allow flexibility in their design process.
I am a web developer, and I would never release a site to the public that can't be zoomed. That's just asking for people to click the close button (because it's the only one they can hit accurately).
I'm more than a bit sickened by the current trend toward non-flexibility in web design. It used to be frowned on to hard-code anything. Now it's frowned on to
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That's why mobile browsers have an option to display the "desktop" version of a site.
But that fails to work on some websites.
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That's why mobile browsers have an option to display the "desktop" version of a site.
But that fails to work on some websites.
The problem isn't mobile sites when viewed from a phone, the problem is when a mobile theme is presented to all users, including desktop users.
blind old farts (Score:1)
the other 30% are blind old farts like me.
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I'm having trouble reconciling how the other 30% can be divided up between every other internet device that's not on mobile. Internet connected TVs, DVD/Bluray players, other streaming devices, game consoles, ebook readers, tablets, laptops, desktops... whatever.
Wasn't the article just before this one about how pirate tv services are taking a bite out paid tv providers?
consider the Rapture (Score:3)
Rapture #1: All the mobile users of the internet are snatched up by God.
Does anyone other than click-steam entrepreneurs even notice their absence?
Rapture #2: All the desktop and workstation users of the internet are snatched up by an advanced alien civilization.
The internet ceases to function in 3, 2, 1 ... 404.
Help desks everywhere begin to return 410 Gone.
#ShitShitShit commences trending on Twitter.
NBN (Score:2)
Australia is spending a motza on rolling out a national broadband network.
I'm now wondering if it would have been better to spend that $70B on a next gen LTE rollout. (aka 5G)
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NBN is already agnostic on the delivery method. And cell towers still need a fiber backbone.
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The NBN is for very large HD television.
You do not need it for small mobile. Nor for general web surfing etc.
"but it wasn't such a great experience" (Score:2)
It still isn't.
Streaming (Score:2)
70% of our time on the internet? No surprise really. People spend their day listening to streaming music, and many people watch movies on their phone.
The other factor is that so many sites which were new and fascinating a decade ago are driving off visitors with crappy content and intrusive advertising.
Shouldn't the App Apper guy make an appearance? (Score:2)
This story seems tailor made for him...
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He's busy romancing Cow Guy and Goatse
Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
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It really is still one internet, in spite of the filtering that the first three you mentioned engage in. A lot of people are confused as to what the internet actually is, which means that defining the internet is something that most people fail to do. Rather, all they know is what they see in their web browser or mobile apps.
The internet is simple to define: Networks communicating with other networks in order to form one larger internetwork. In fact, the word internet is just a short form of internetwork.
You have that backwards (Score:1)
HTC Dream was promising, everything after is CRAP (Score:5, Insightful)
Then the next phone I ended up with had a four-row keyboard and an optical "trackball." OK, it was still quite usable and the optical tracking was admittedly a lot nicer, plus it was less hefty and still a nifty slider phone, with better hardware specs than the Dream had.
Then hardware keyboards on phones were...just gone...and the "mouse" was eliminated entirely, as were physical buttons (in favor of nasty glitchy badly-behaved capacitive touch buttons.) That was where phones went to shit and never recovered. Never mind the app-ocalypse, where the free and open internet was gutted by the use of walled-garden apps, each with their own inconsistent behavior and each requiring its own ever-growing hefty pile of resources on your never-sufficient internal storage.
Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL? Because Facebook can't mine your damn contacts if they don't have an app, that's why.
Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs. Bring back phones that don't suck and stop shoving apps down our throats.
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Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs.
They might want to sell a few phones. Nobody wants to buy phones with "5 row keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs".
Commercial viability matters. Catering to the 0.01% does not make for a viable market.
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Nobody? A quick google search for "i miss slider phones" gets 39 Million results.
That's a lot of nobodies.
Remember why Blackberry held on for years: they had a physical keyboard. POS Blackberry phones with limited app options and zero privacy sold well for years because people that do actual work are far more productive writing emails with a physical keyboard than tapping on glass.
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I had the pleasure of owning the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) when it was a pretty new thing. The five-row keyboard, trackball, and extra hardware buttons basically meant that I had a tiny "laptop" in my pocket. I used it for VNC. I used it for SSH. I even ran a Debian overlay with X on it just because I could. It made the iPhones look stupid: one button, clunky touch-everything, dumbed down trash.
HTC Thunderbolt owner here, previously a connoisseur of the LG series, from the EnV on up to the Voyager. (Now I'm back to LG's G# and V20 ones.)
I'd love for a physical keyboard to return, but I also need a full-fledged and full-sized screen. Honestly, if something like the Sidewinder came back, I'd really seriously considering it. That's how much I love writing text.
The problem is that the market is limited, and with the learning spell check on most phones, the poor accuracy of fast touchscreen typing is o
Good luck coding on an iPad on the city bus (Score:2)
For those that need frequent mobile access to a CLI, we have a better solution now that we didn't have then: Tablets. Set up your iPad with an integrated keyboard cover
...and it won't work while you're riding public transit. The App Store Review Guidelines prohibit running many development tools directly on the iPad. A workaround is to use the iPad to connect to an app server elsewhere on the Internet, such as in your home, through SSH, X11, VNC, or RDP. But the recurring fees for cellular Internet access on the iPad and for a dedicated IP on your app server make that workaround expensive. For this use case, a full-fledged compact laptop still beats an iPad.
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Carry a foldable keyboard (Score:2)
All of the "better options" that have keyboards are also way too big to carry everywhere you go.
You could buy a foldable keyboard by Geyes [dx.com] that fits in your pocket, as recommended by DrYak [slashdot.org]. But that doesn't solve the by-design OS limits.
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It's good that it's not the same thing because you can use one pocket folding keyboard with multiple devices, such as a phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, and living room computer.
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I'm not convinced anyone outside of the Bay Area regularly "cod[es] on an iPad on the city bus".
Maybe the hipstery parts of New York City.
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The big deal with the 5-row keyboard is that it has function and number keys as well as a staggered key layout just like a
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Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL?
Because a vocal minority of users don't want to run script in the browser, but they are willing to install native apps outside the browser to access the same resources. Many users of sites like Slashdot and SoylentNews consider a native app somehow better for two reasons. First, they're platform-specific, as opposed to necessarily having to go through a least-common-denominator cross-platform compatibility layer. Second, a user can theoretically download the source code of any app on F-Droid and (hire someo
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Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs. Bring back phones that don't suck and stop shoving apps down our throats.
I have a BB Passport [gsmarena.com]. The keyboard doubles as a touchpad so you can scroll with it.
Works for me because the few android apps I want to run work fine on the BB (Actually, Words with Friends runs better on the Passport than on Android because in-app advertisements do not get downloaded).
Better display than an iPhone too, which is a nice bonus.
Depends on the use (Score:3)
It's still a mess (Score:3)
Not me (Score:2)
I only use the internet on my phone when on the road, and there's something I REALLY need
Tiny screens suck. Tiny keyboards suck
I much prefer my 30" monitor on my desk
IoT... just the internet (Score:2)
The internet... just the internet.
All there ever was, or will be, is the internet.
Nope (Score:2)
The way I keep my cell plan cheap is to have the cheapest data plan. I save my internet browsing for the computer at home.
Fine. (Score:2)
You suckers just keep going on thinking that everything you can see on a phone is the Internet. You can keep port 80. There are 65534 others I can use.
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They're helping drive society towards nanosecond attention spans for one...
Re: For many their phone is their computer (Score:1)
Hey you kids .... get off of my lawn!!! Every older generation thinks the younger generation is terrible. In reality the only generation that really applied to were the baby boomers and they are back at it again with Trump. God willing, Trump will be the last boomer President.
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Sampling the people I know IRL, about 1 in 3 of them have any kind of desktop, including laptop, computer. The rest are mobile-only. That trend accelerates all the time.
I know there's a lot of denial about that, just like the Unix Workstation people denied that Windows PCs were gonna take over and render them irrelevant. Same now. Non-mobile modalities are being rendered irrelevant.
In 5 years you'll log into your bank using biometrics captured on your phone. The concept of a "keyboard" is going away: most people can't even touch type any more.
I've seen this too, more and more people relying on mobile over an actual PC. Two reasons I see:
-Mobile is always on them so it's convenient
-Mobile has a more appliance like interface. Most people don't want to fart around managing their computer, they just want to be able to easily check the weather, check their mail, check their bank account balance, check social media.
A lot of "internet usage" is social media and messaging apps, which many very strongly target mobile devices, and people always have them
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In 5 years you'll log into your bank using biometrics captured on your phone.
You can sign in with a fingerprint on most phones now.
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If the "Internet" is all resources that can be accessed through an Internet connection, the "mobile Internet" is the subset of these resources for which access on a smartphone is bearable.
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Because different media types have different costs and availability for bandwidth. This has always been true.
The bigger question is...what kind of an idiot thinks the mobile internet is AT ALL somehow distinct from the internet? They are and always have been the same fucking thing. Anybody who disagrees, please tell us all at what time it was impossible to route an internet protocol (IP) packet from a mobile device to a non-mobile web server? And before answering, know that the days before mobile phones cou