Strange innovations of the post-industrial era in our smartphones.
Rereading the news of the last year and comparing it with the news of the beginning of this year, I caught myself thinking that nothing new was happening. Major manufacturers, and after them all others, are doing cosmetic work on the same gadgets. Like an old experienced dressmaker, they reshape the old coat in a new way in order to please the capricious courtiers and the common people who take their example. By courtiers I mean people who do not think about the cost of the purchase and want some kind of novelty, a kind of new channel for draining the earned money, whose pressure replaces simple feelings. Those. people who are fed up. Square buttons are sewn onto an old coat instead of round buttons, and the cuff is turned off with fur instead of velvet. As you understand, this does not affect the temperature of the body inside the coat.
An innovative design by actors at the opening of the Gotthard Tunnel, Switzerland, 2011.
In the last post on this topic, we talked about the achieved limit of the required performance of smartphones. Indeed, the limit has come; there are no new tasks on the horizon that cannot be solved by the old means. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of the army, where, so that social problems do not begin in the collective, it is customary to invent problems and then heroically solve them. It seems that everything is in business, and there is no strength to think about something other than rest, but the fact that puddles were dug out with shovels, and then the hatch on the parade ground was painted pink, something like that. But motion and eventful life, and the tired organism does not think about suppression of consciousness by absurd actions. So the idea was born to sum up some results of the 'improvements' invented by marketers of our smartphones over the past years.
Content
- Rounded protective glass of the screen and the screen itself
- Hole in the screen for the camera
- Screen pulling
- Fear building
- Cloning apps on Google Play
- Summary
Rounded protective glass of the screen and the screen itself
Let's talk sensibly, the screen in a modern smartphone is needed exclusively for two things – viewing content and control. Insane in its cost for the user, the operation of combat marketers, who pumped up designers for no one knows what, led to the massive appearance on the market of devices that were inconvenient both to operate and to view. In the first case, even such hardened specialists as surveyors were forced to retrain their fingers for careful driving. In the second case, part of the image is lost. The fact is that backward filmmakers, television people and youtubers did not even know that they needed to shoot a video with edges rounded around the frame.
If you add two more horizontal borders with an indent of 2-3 mm (which is true), then the whole absurdity of the design will become even more noticeable
I must admit that if this decorative deformation of proven solutions did not cost the buyer crazy money, then there would be no outrage. But the fact of life is that the plague of screen curvature has emerged from very energy-intensive incubator plants, in the construction of which companies have invested tens of millions of expensive money. And now they are eager to get them back at a profit in order to come up with something even more insane, preferably in the style of the art direction 'destruction'.
An example of the art direction Destruction – 'Dancing House' in Prague.
Looking up from the central entrance of the same destructive house. Do you want to live in this?
And we must also admit that a normal person does not need 'framelessness', in the entire history of the creation of phones, no one suffered from the attack of the frame, was not shocked to death by it.
Hole in the screen for the camera
When I was little, I loved to draw space rockets with a fountain pen, but it never crossed my mind to offer anyone to buy tickets for them for real money to go on a fictional trip to the moon. But modern designers have succeeded in something similar. The notorious 'bezel-less' looks good in pictures from advertising brochures, but in practice it makes no sense. Is the process of 'pushing the loose', placing the camera on the screen, productive at the present stage of technology development? Obviously not. It still does not work to hide the camera hole, and the eye involuntarily stumbles upon a black eye in the middle of a bright field. What happens next? Over time, the brain ceases to be surprised and takes such a picture as a rule, completely forgetting that it does not like it. Why was this done from a technical point of view? But why, there is simply no other answer – the frames remained in place, the camera didn’t shoot better, and the price of the smartphone went up.
This is not a bang, and a smartphone is not a pony to wear and evoke positive emotions.
We were sold tickets for a painted rocket, and the next logical step would be to buy a site on the moon. Although, excuse me, someone is already selling them.
In light of the above, I would like to note that the camera is required to shoot well, and not hide. By some miracle, there is some progress in this direction, the initially disgusting raw image inside the camera module after post-processing with proprietary algorithms (each manufacturer has its own) becomes better from year to year.
Screen pulling
At the dawn of the film industry, i.e. when creating artificial visual worlds, no one paid attention to the aspect ratio. Probably, the creators understood that any object remote from human eyes occupies an insignificant part of the space visible to them. And if this is 'negligible', then you shouldn't bother with it, and you can direct all efforts to the quality of the image and semantic content. Ha! It is immediately obvious that they did not live in the post-industrial era, otherwise they would have been explained that the optimal screen aspect ratio is 19.5: 9 in the Samsung Galaxy S8, that this is the result of many years of research by some British anthropologists.
First, elongated screens appeared in Samsung TVs, and then in smartphones. Ready for a 32: 9 screen?
Perhaps pulling the screen launched processes even more ridiculous and stochastic than damaging the screen matrix for installing a camera. Suffice it to recall the new smartphones with a screen resolution of 1280×640. For example, INOI 6 with a 5.5-inch screen. Guess what happened? In one of the Chinese factories, they simply took and cropped a standard display with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels to get into the fashion trend. There are now many new smartphones like this, which can be compared to the coat from the prologue, which had the long skirts cut off to make them more 'youthful' or even 'sporty'. As in the case of the first section, there is absolutely no technical reason for such an 'upgrade', the content is still almost all designed for a 16: 9 aspect ratio (except for cinema), and everything that happens is another senseless pseudo-scientific stuff.
Fear building
It's pretty weird to hear the 'buy this because it's safer' argument from electronics retailers. It's about the trendy, never-ending topic of 'cybersecurity'. In an imaginary and dangerous cyberspace, there are villains who steal your money from electronic wallets, spam viruses and other werewolf applications. We somehow forgot that we live in a real world, where quite some individuals commit crimes against other individuals. And against this background, it is even surprising to read that they would rather steal money from the owner of a cheap smartphone than from the owner of an expensive one. The owner of a cheap phone for 460 renminbi (4,500 rubles) has more money than the owner of an active iCloud account, the robbers think and begin deep development of the 'client', using professional Internet seductresses, corrupt bank workers and dishonest psychologists.
The Internet is inundated with content on the topic of Internet theft
Let's be honest, money is being stolen from those who have it. Nevertheless, on the branded sites of chipset manufacturers, “electronic security” began to play one of the main roles, became an “advantage”. If this were actually the case, then how would the dialogue take place in a cellular communication salon?
– Tell me, please, why a green phone is twice as expensive as a red one? After all, they are the same in everything?
– In everything, but not in everything. If you buy a red phone, then on the first call all passwords of social networks will be stolen from you and your naked photos will be posted to the public. And this black one, which is cheaper than red, do not even think about taking it, because of him eight people have already hanged themselves.
Cloning apps on Google Play
From the side of an ordinary user, it seems that the developers of new applications have completely lost their imagination. Judge for yourself, as soon as a conditionally good application appears that uses a new idea in its work, it immediately has clones of varying degrees of quality. There are many examples, and in the case of a match-3 game, there are even too many. How many are there? Thousands? Tens of thousands? It is very clear that the so-called developers did not develop anything, but simply copied a good idea. What does this lead to? The user Android simply drowns among unnecessary information, and application reviewers cannot help him, because they drowned even earlier.
Various applications
As a result, most users (especially new ones) use what Google itself recommends. There is a certain expense of interests, because the user did not want the recommended application, but the necessary one. The solution would be a system that at least partially restricts the cloning of ideas, but it seems that Google does not consider this reprehensible.
Summary
This material does not carry extremist calls and is not aimed at inciting any hatred, nor does it contain instructions on how to create a nuclear bomb. Let's summarize some of the results. Nowadays, the manufacturer has become a seller, but he no longer expects an 'order' from the buyer, does not react in any way to his expectations. The producer-seller compensates for the break in the logical chain 'supply-demand' with fictitious innovations and spends a lot of money on their promotion, and in the absence of an alternative, the consumer has no leverage over the raging market players. We don't even know what those who came up with the idea of inserting the camera into the screen look like, or that 'bezel-less' is good.
Do not agree? Welcome to the comments.