A sign of the smartphone times

Having recently switched cell service providers, and having thus spent time also picking a new phone, I was really struck by this Vice/Motherboard article when I came across it:

Thursday, at a flashy event in New York, Samsung unveiled yet another phone: the Galaxy Note 9. Like you’d expect, it’s rectangular, it has a screen, and it has a few cameras. While unveiling what it hopes will be the next hit, it unknowingly confirmed something we’ve all been wondering: the smartphone industry is out of ideas.

Phones are officially boring: the only topic that’s up for debate with the Galaxy Note 9 is the lack of the iconic notch found on the iPhone X, and that it has a headphone jack. The notch has been cloned by almost every phone maker out there, and the headphone jack is a commodity that’s unfortunately dying. However, the fact that we’re comparing phones with or without a chunk out of the screen or a hole for your headphones demonstrates just how stuck the industry is.

It’s clear that there’s nothing really to see here. Yeah, the Note is a big phone, and it has a larger battery too. It’s in different colors, it’s faster than last year, and it has wireless charging. Everything you see here is from a laundry list of features that other smartphone manufacturers also have, and the lack of differentiation becomes clearer every year. It’s the pinnacle of technology, and it’s a snooze-fest. 

Yeah... did I mention already that Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore? I think I might have.

This isn’t exclusively a Samsung problem: Every manufacturer from Apple to Xiaomi faces the same predicament. [...] As smartphones pushed the boundaries and iterated at breakneck pace over the last decade, they’ve quickly run into limitations governed by the laws of physics: A phone can only get so thin or light, and the year-to-year speed and battery upgrades are becoming less-and-less impressive. There’s only so many millimeters you can shave off, and megapixels to cram into the camera, before it’s good enough for most people and nobody cares anymore.

This is what the end of Moore's Law means. Smartphones were able to get smaller because smartphone makers were still learning how to pack all of those components into the smallest space possible, but there are limits to that which we've apparently reached. The race to smallness has yielded benefits for laptops and desktops, also, but microchips simply aren't increasing in power anymore, which means that this year's new tech is... more or less identical to last year's tech. Which is identical to the year's before that, and the year's before that, and the year's before that...

You get the idea.

It was only a matter of time before people started to notice that technology wasn't actually changing anymore. The exponential growth of computing power has been such a driver of change in our daily lives for a long time now, and we're still coming to terms with exactly what that means, but it looks like we're going to get that time now... before technology leaps forward again, leaving us panting in its cold, impersonal wake.

Another baby step for VR

VR still has a long, long way to go, but developments like this might help. From WCCFTech:

An industry consortium lead by Nvidia, Oculus, Valve, AMD, and Microsoft have today introduced the VirtualLink specification which is an open standard for next-generation VR headsets to connect to PCs and other similar devices with a single high bandwidth USB Type-C connector, forgoing the mess of cables that have traditionally plagued VR gaming.

The Connection is an alternate mode of USB-C should simplify and speed up the setup time for your VR gear avoiding one of the major inconveniences of having and using a VR headset in a room where it isn’t always connected. It should also make VR experiences much easier with smaller devices like laptops and notebooks.

[...]

This may also help in the long term with the need to provide higher display resolutions and high bandwidth cameras for tracking. VirtualLink connects with VR headsets to simultaneously deliver four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, which are scalable for future needs; a USB3.1 data channel for supporting high-resolution cameras and sensors; and up to 27 watts of power.

One of the nicer things about VirtualLink is that it has been purpose built for VR with optimizing latency and keying in on bandwidth demands to make the next generation of VR experiences a much better one.

Several of the major VR players are part of this initiative, though, which gives it a better chance to succeed than it would have otherwise, but it will be years before VirtualLink stars appearing on the market in actual VR devices, and years more before it can become the VR industry standard. Notably absent from the VirtualLink consortium, too, are Sony and Samsung, who currently have the two best-selling VR devices on the market in PSVR and GearVR, which could mean trouble for this newborn VR device standard.

Still... progress is progress, and this is a baby step in a direction that many analysts say VR needs to go. A lack of hardware standards isn't VR's biggest problem, obviously, but it is a problem, and VirtualLink could help bring some much-needed standardization to the VR industry.

Virtual reality meets commercial reality as headset sales plunge

By now, a headline like the one above, which I nicked from The Reg, should not be a surprise. The article that accompanied it, however, was much more optimistic:

Shipments of virtual reality kit have plunged, but growth is just around the corner.

So said analyst firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker, which found “shipments of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets were down 30.5 per cent year over year, totalling 1.2 million units in the first quarter of 2018.”

But IDC also predicts a rebound, for a couple of reasons.

One is that 2017 saw lots of headsets bundled with smartphones as the likes of Samsung and HTC sought to stoke the VR market. They’ve since stopped doing that, so this year’s scary shipment figures reflect the end of giveaways rather than a dip in real demand.

Another is that new products like the Oculus Go are both superior to their predecessors and nicely-priced, so their arrival in stores should spur demand.

A third is that the VR/AR ecosystem has matured and it’s therefore becoming easier to create content, which will see business adopt VR. IDC said it “believes the commercial market to be equally important and predicts it will grow from 24 per cent of VR headset shipments in 2018 to 44.6 per cent by 2022.”

How long, exactly, has a VR breakout been "right around the corner?" It seems like forever, but it can't have been more than two years.

Dispensing with that bit of ridiculous boosterism, though, we can move on to the rest of IDC's case here, which is even weaker.

Facebook finally launches the Oculus Go. Will it matter?

VR evangelists have been praying for a low-cost, stand-alone VR headset, with no wires and no high-end smartphone, PS4, or PC required. The idea is that turning VR from an expensive peripheral into a more reasonably priced stand-alone device is just what VR needs to become a thing. Well, on the first day of F8, Facebook has answered their prayers by officially launching the Oculus Go.

As reported by TechCrunch:

Oculus Go, Facebook’s cheap and capable standalone VR headset, is now on sale. It costs $199 for the version with 32GB of onboard storage, and $249 for the 64GB variety.

Why: VR headsets where you have to stick your phone in are clumsy and prevent Facebook from controlling the whole experience. Instead of relying on the Samsung Gear headset shell and your iPhone or Android, Facebook gets to dictate everything about the perfect VR rig you can strap on first-timers.

[...]

Oculus wants you to watch TV inside its new Go headset. At first you’ll get Facebook Watch, but expect apps like Netflix and Hulu to arrive eventually.

Why: There just aren’t enough great VR experiences, but perhaps Facebook can get people spending more time in their headsets by creating a virtual big screen for 2D content.

Yeah.... good luck with that. I'm going to stand by my earlier prediction, though: with "just not enough great VR experiences" to drive adoption, it won't matter that FB's new headset is a cheaper stand-alone. It still offers no obvious value to the consumer, which means that its value per dollar of cost is still effectively zero. This is the problem that plagues VR, and the fact that Oculus want you to watch TV in VR, because there's nothing else to do with the Go, eloquently illustrates it.

If this thing sells even as well as Samsung's GearVR, I'll be astonished, given that the hype and excitement around VR has completely dissipated everywhere except in tech media. Look for the Go to sell about as well as the Rift, and for prices to be dropping by X-Mas.

Samsung ups their DeX game

Back in May, Samsung released their Dex smartphone dock, potentially bridging the gap between desktop and mobile computing with Android. Engadget described it as an "impressive, unnecessary, phone-powered PC," which suffered from one major flaw:

There's a limited number of apps optimized for DeX and others don't always work properly on the big screen. [...] Ultimately, DeX blurs the line between smartphone and PC better than any other attempt we've seen -- we're just not convinced many people will find it genuinely useful.

Samsung, apparently, agreed with this assessment, and decided to do something about it. They decided that what DeX really needs is Linux.

From The Reg:

Samsung has announced it will soon become possible to run actual proper Linux on its Note8, Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones – and even Linux desktops.

Yeah, yeah, we know Android is built on Linux, but you know what we mean. Samsung said it's working on an app called “Linux on Galaxy” that will let users “run their preferred Linux distribution on their smartphones utilizing the same Linux kernel that powers the Android OS.”

“Whenever they need to use a function that is not available on the smartphone OS, users can simply switch to the app and run any program they need to in a Linux OS environment,” Samsung says. The app also allows multiple OSes to run on a device.

[...]

Samsung thinks developers are the market for Linux on Galaxy, as it means they “can now set up a fully functional development environment with all the advantages of a desktop setting that is accessible anytime, anywhere”. Samsung's announcement suggests developers will “code using their mobile on-the-go and with Samsung DeX, and can seamlessly continue the task on a larger display.”

We keep creeping closer to the day when you really can do all of your personal computing, productivity and mobile, with a single device that fits in your pocket. With Microsoft giving up on Windows 10 mobile, and HP putting a bullet in Continuum, it's looking more and more like that truly-all-in-one PC will be Linux-powered, and not Windows-powered.

Samsung's DeX may succeed at turning Android into a viable mobile/desktop hybrid OS... and pose a significant threat to Windows.

Ever since Apple debuted the very first iPhone, tech media pundits have been forecasting the end of the desktop PC as a viable thing. Mobile devices, we were told, would soon be able to do everything that our PCs could do, thus eliminating the need for PCs altogether. But while there are lots of things that you can do with a mobile device, a fact that's made Android into the most-used OS on earth, you simply haven't been able to use your smartphone as a viable productivity tool. Touch interfaces are inaccurate, imprecise, ergonomically awful, and require you to have your hands between your eyes and your screen in order to do anything; compared to earlier phones' 12-digit numpads, touchscreens are a huge improvement, but for every other kind of device, they're a huge step down.

So, mobile device makers tried again, with tablets. Remember when the launch of Apple's iPad was supposed to sound the death knell of traditional laptop and desktop PCs? Remember when even Microsoft bought into that hype, and replaced Windows' desktop with an iOS-style app store? Windows 8 was one of Microsoft's most unpopular products ever, rivalled only by Clippy and Windows Vista. Tablets, it turns out, have all the same touch interface problems that smartphones do, except without the portability that makes smartphones so ubiquitous.

And so we lurched onwards, with Windows dominant on laptop and desktop PCs, Android dominant on mobile devices, and no apparent means of bridging the gap between the two, with Microsoft's UWP having failed to do so. Google's ChromeOS, which was recently expanded to allow users to run Android apps, has been growing steadily, stealing desktop/laptop market share from Windows in a mature market where PC sales have been declining steadily for years, but even Google hasn't eaten into Microsoft's lead enough to be truly worrisome yet. For all the hyperbole on all sides, the PC market really seemed to have matured, becoming resistant to change in the way that mature markets tend to be; the mobile market didn't seem to be too far behind.

That, however, was yesterday. Today, it suddenly looks like all of that may be about to change. Because today, we now know that Samsung have cracked the code, with a new Desktop Experience (DeX) dock that bridges the gap between the convenience and ubiquity of mobile devices, and the ergonomics and versatility of a desktop PCs. More importantly still, DeX seems to actually work.

From The Reg:

Well, no one saw this one coming. Samsung has succeeded where Microsoft and HP have struggled (so far) in turning a phone into a PC.

When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8 last month, its new multimode capability DeX (for "desktop experience") barely got a mention. With a new dock, the DeX Station, the Galaxy could plug into a keyboard, mouse and a larger display, for a desktop-like experience: with apps that rescale smartly to landscape format, overlapping windows and window management. After putting it through its paces, I'm hugely impressed. Samsung has done a solid and thoughtful job here.

This is significant. Giving a phone multimode isn't a new idea, and was pursued for a while by Motorola with Atrix. Atrix was canned five years ago, and for ages nobody picked up the baton, even though phones got ever more powerful, and the software more mature.

For Continuum, Microsoft created a class of portable Windows 10 mobile apps that were desktop friendly (UWP), but it failed to support the existing WP app catalog, which couldn't convert. Microsoft's already weak position in the mobile market deterred app writers from targeting a niche within a niche. And Microsoft has been slow to develop the functionality: here we are, two years on from the first Continuum demo, and it still lacks the promised multiwindow support.

Android doesn't have these problems, because it's already the world's most popular OS, and because it's Java and the apps are portable. A Remix OS PC will run apps from the Google Play store. So Android has great untapped potential to be the leading multimode OS. And with Android Nougat 7.0, Google has built much better multiwindowing capabilities into Android.

[...]

It wasn't quite perfect. The browser will default to mobile scaling, so text looks gigantic.

And the absence of a mic port is puzzling. The DeX station booms out decent audio for conference calls, but I don't necessarily want all phone calls piping through the speaker. The DeX station wouldn't recognise a Plantronics USB headset, so that leaves Bluetooth as your only option for privacy here.

But these are minor wrinkles. DeX greatly expands what you can do with a phone. Continuum's app gap means it currently has little appeal beyond Microsoft enterprises. But Samsung already has a strong offering here with Knox, and it knows how to make a phone. I found the Galaxy S8 experience significantly marred by a single poor design decision (the sensor) and Bixby, both of which made the device unnecessarily annoying to use. But given the pace of progress, millions, and soon billions, of phones will be able to run a DeX-like experience.

Yes, that's right: DeX is here, it works, and it turns Android into a viable desktop environment in which you can actually get some work done. Against this, Microsoft has one, and only one, defense: the simple fact that Windows has, until now, been the preferred tool for getting stuff done. Everybody runs Windows, and has done for decades; combined with Microsoft's obsession for backwards compatibility, this ensures that every Windows PC comes access with a huge library of software that it can run with few if any problems, and an even larger pool of programs that can be made to work on a current PC with just a little tweaking.

Except, of course, for Microsoft's latest Windows offering, 10 S, which doesn't come with that functionality at all. Oops!

Microsoft are so intent on being Apple, and Google, and Amazon, all at the same time, that they're actively undermining their single biggest competitive advantage. Their desperation to convert Windows into a walled garden ecosystem will also wall Windows off from an enormous trove of the very software that makes it worth running Windows in the first place; the underlying assumption, that they owned the desktop market with Windows, was the only thing that made their strategy seem viable.

Well, now Android is a viable desktop operating system, with millions of compatible phones about to enter circulation, and a respectable library of apps ready to go, right out of the gate... something that Windows' UWP ecosystem still doesn't have. That's right: the "app gap" which killed the Windows Phone, and strangled Windows 10's Mobile version before it could even get started, is still very much a thing, and suddenly relevant to the one market that seemed to be safe ground for Microsoft.

Even better for Google? They didn't have to lift a finger to make this happen, In much the same way as Amazon was able to seamlessly merge dominance in cloud server and storage with their existing product distribution capacity, all to make Echo a viable thing, DeX is all based on systems and structures that are already in place. The ground work was already done, here; Samsung is just showing everybody how to reap the seeds that were already sown. Worse yet, now that Samsung's DeX has showed everybody how to do this, and make it work, the imitators are sure to follow. If HTC doesn't have some version of this in production by the end of the year, I'll be very surprised, and you can that Apple isn't far behind with a similar dock for their iPhone... which also has a robust user base and app assortment on tap.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Microsoft do not have the resources to be Apple, and Google, and Amazon, and still be Microsoft; Apple and Google alone are each larger than Microsoft is. And that doesn't begin to include all of Google's smartphone hardware partners, all of whom are just as capable of innovating as Microsoft are themselves. And by abandoning that which made Microsoft a uniquely dominant force in personal computing for decades, the team at Redmond might just be dooming themselves to irrelevance in the one area where they probably felt completely secure, until about five minutes ago.

Now, for anyone that's concerned about the fate of Windows here, don't be. While high-end smartphones have more computing power than ever, they still don't have enough power for graphics-intensive applications like video editing, CGI effects, and gaming, all of which will still need dedicated workstation PCs for a long time to come; this is why gaming PC sales are booming, even while PC sales overall are in decline. There will still be PCs, and there will still be Windows. But for less-demanding applications, Android could easily become the "PC" of choice for almost everyone else, leaving Windows PCs in a position much more akin to MacOS and Linux, than its current position of desktop dominance.

What happened to VR?

Well, if you're reading my blog, then you probably already know what happened, but Business Insider has a pretty fair assessment of the state of VR play:

Over the past year, evidence has stacked up that VR isn't as hot as everyone thought it'd be, and it feels poised to go the way of the smartwatch, a once-promising new computing platform that ultimately flopped once introduced into the real world.

The evidence is tough to ignore.

Following the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, we have yet to see a breakthrough game or app. Plus, the cost is prohibitive for most people: The headsets start at $600, and go up from there if you want the motion controllers and other accessories. Plus you need a powerful computer to run the hardware, which will run you at least another $500.

Sony was supposed to be the savior of the high-end VR headset. Its new PlayStation VR is designed to work with the tens of millions of PlayStation 4 consoles already out in the wild, giving it an immediate advantage over the competition. But, like with Vive and Oculus Rift, there wasn't much enthusiasm around the games and content for the PlayStation VR.

Google appears to be stumbling too. It slashed the price of its new Daydream View headset this week to $49 following a report from Amir Efrati of The Information that Google is "disappointed" with early usage numbers for the device.

Meanwhile, overall sales of VR headsets are very low, and PlayStation VR appears to have performed well worse than expected, according to data compiled by market research firm SuperData.

Given VR's lack of a value proposition, I was expecting to see that sales of these expensive white elephants had suffered, but I had no idea that sales for VR hardware were this terrible. So far, only Gear VR has actually topped the million mark in sales; PSVR managed only 28.85% of its sales forecast from only a few months earlier; the Rift and the Vive don't have a million users between them; and Google is selling Daydream at fire sale prices, apparently oblivious to the fact that a $50 add-on to an $900 Pixel smartphone still puts its VR offering well above the price point of either Oculus' or HTC's offerings.... for a smartphone-based VR experience.

This is beyond simply "not pretty." This is disastrous. And there's no sign of it improving significantly anytime soon. It's a good thing that Mark Zuckerberg is OK with spending another $3 billion on VR R&D before seeing a dollar in profits, because they're not going to be making a profit on Oculus anytime in the foreseeable future. Neither are HTC, Valve, Sony, or Google. Or anyone else that's pinned their hopes (and futures) to the VR hype train.

BI's article ends with the blunt assertion that VR "is going to remain a niche product at best." Honestly, given how badly VR is performing so far, and how many hurdles it faces, I think that's an overly optimistic assessment. So far, VR isn't even a large enough niche to turn a profit, given how expensive it is to develop for the platform.

Google's Daydream will not start a VR revolution

Google has finally thrown their hat in the VR ring (for real, anyway), and tech media writers can't say enough good things about their Daydream platform.

Here's the important part: Daydream is not a standalone VR headset, and is not competing with Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or Sony's PlayStation VR. Instead, it's an attachment for your Pixel smartphone (also announced today), which makes it basically the same as Samsung's Gear VR, except for Google's new line of phones.

Gear VR sold pretty well, but the fact that Samsung has recently announced that they're keeping their "standalone" VR headset (in the sense of including the display elements in the headset; Gear VR and Daydream both need your smartphone to provide the screens) offering on the sidelines until they see how the VR market shapes up speaks volumes -- that even a company with a decently-selling mobile VR products is staying out of the more expensive home VR market says quite clearly that the success of standalone VR headsets is no sure thing.

Whether Google will sell enough Pixel phones in a mature smartphone market to be able to sell enough Daydream VR accessories to actually compete with Gear VR's market share is, of course, anyone's guess. It would seem that Pixel is aimed more at the iPhone than the Galaxy Note, but sales of all smartphones have plateaued recently, mainly because everybody already has a good-enough phone, and thus no pressing need to upgrade.

Added to which, Google's previous forays into consumer electronics, including both the now-defunct Nexus phone and the now-defunct Google Glass, don't exactly inspire confidence in Google's ability to compete head-to-head with Apple as a manufacturer of consumer electronics.

The Pixel does look like a good phone, but at prices ranging from US$650 to US$870, MSRP, data plan not included, it's tough to imagine Pixel taking any significant share of the smartphone market away from long-time iPhone customers, or from other Android phone lines. I could be wrong, of course, but I can't help but feeling like this move comes at least a year too late.

I feel confident making one prediction, though: Google's not going to sell enough Pixel + Daydream bundles to make VR into any more of a thing than it is now.