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Tag: mobile phones

  • It is as if you were on your phone: Why – Pippin Barr

    So what if we had an application on our phone that allowed us to seem to be on our phone, to go through those reassuring motions, to know what to do, to appear 100% like a human on their phone, but without having to actually be on our phone an exposed to the direness of the news, the panic of dating, the shitpile of social media, the emptiness of online video, the timesuck of games? A kind of contentless experience. For the win!

    That’s the underlying speculative but also totally honest motivation behind this particular game. I’m making it because I think it’s legitimately something people might use and find helpful and because it is fundamentally funny that that is a possible design goal. To me it’s both a piece of comedy and a piece of truth and I can’t tell which is more important or if they’re even distinct. (And I like that.)

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  • Apple discontinuing this 18-year-old iPhone feature – MacRumors

    Apple reportedly plans to announce a new iPhone SE as soon as next week, and the device is expected to feature a full-screen design with Face ID, instead of a Touch ID home button. That means Apple will no longer sell any new iPhone models with a home button, for the first time since the original iPhone launched.

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  • ‘Hey, Gemini!’ Mega Galaxy S25 leak confirms major AI upgrades and lots more – Android Authority

    The leaked image above shows that the Galaxy S25 series is getting a new “Now Brief” feature that will provide users a personalized summary of their day. It feels like a rehash of the Google Now feature from yesteryears. The image shows that Now Brief will include cards with information about the weather, suggestions for using different features, a recap of images clicked during the day, daily activity goals, and more. We’re guess[ing] the feature will use AI to collate all this information from various apps and other connected Galaxy devices.

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  • An iPhone owner’s guide to living off the app grid – The Verge

    I spent about an hour deleting icons, arranging widgets, and adding controls to create my new homescreen. The camera control button on the iPhone 16 renders that icon unnecessary; the action button launches the oft-used daycare app, so that could go too. When I was done, my haphazardly maintained system of folders with cute emoji labels was whittled down to just four apps in the dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages, which I’m affectionately calling “Windows Phone 2.0.” Was it scary? A little. But you know what? I don’t miss those rows of icons at all. Nine out of ten times the app I’m looking for is in the Siri suggested apps that pop up when I open search. If not, I type in the first few letters of the app name and there it is. You could swipe over to the app library, I guess, but I hardly ever do.

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  • A treasure trove of tech history goes online with the unveiling of the Nokia Design Archive – Wallpaper

    Now the Aalto University in Helsinki has launched the Nokia Design Archive, an online portal that lays bare two decades of the company’s history, including hitherto unseen sketches, concepts and marketing material alongside some of the most legendary, long-lasting and fondly remembered handsets of all time (depending on your age). […] ‘In Finland we have a tradition for being open with big data sets,’ says Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the Nokia Design Archive. ‘The focus is often on numerical, empirical stuff, but what about people? What about how humans perceive things? How are ideas adopted into society? From a scientific perspective, this is the kind of qualitative empirical material we need more of.’

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  • See the light pour through: how art can free us from the exhaustion of smartphone addiction – The Guardian

    As the writer Iris Murdoch said in an interview: “Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves.” Art reminds us to look up from the tiny world we’ve made on the black mirror that lives in our pocket. It helps us to understand our place in the universe, and look out to the expanse, rather than into our filtered selves through tech. It’s time to take back our attention; and to give it to the things we deserve and that matter.

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