Technology · 4 min read
What comes after smartphones?
Every candidate so far has been a smaller screen. The interesting ones have none.
The slab won because it was general
A rectangle of glass can be anything: a map, a camera, a ticket, a shop. Any replacement has to give up that generality, which is why single-purpose devices keep failing in public.
Three directions worth watching
Glasses that annotate what you already see. Audio-first devices that answer without asking you to look. And sensor jewellery that reports on your body rather than the world.
~4.5h
Median daily time spent on a smartphone screen
The real constraint is attention
The next platform will not win on resolution. It will win by giving people back the minutes the current one takes, which is a design problem long before it is a hardware one.
