Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/12/smartphone-displays-to-become-their-speakers-too.html
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Anyone else have a cringe-like reflex when people use their smartphone speakers in public? I can’t even with that. Get yourself and your iPad kid some headphones, FFS.
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I’ve never quite understood ‘walking around in a store holding a phone up on speakerphone like it’s a serving platter and talking towards the microphone hole’
I think perhaps it’s that people want to keep using their phone screen and talk and not use earbuds?
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But the one thing the people I see with a speaker stuck in their ear (or is it the mic?) and the phone held out sideways from the ear, with the microphone (or is it the speaker?) several inches further away, are not doing is using their screen!
I’m tired of moaning that nothing comes with instructions, let alone a manual, these days, but I have probably found out more about what I can do on my phone by accident or reading online blogs than anything Apple ever told me. But we really have reached a point where people need basic education in what a speaker is (and it goes right next to your ear!) and what a microphone is (it goes next to your mouth!) - either that or the mass reintroduction of old phone handsets so that people can adapt to the skeuomorphic metaphor and stop driving the rest of us crazy. They won’t even need earbuds!
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(i have heard more shouted cellphone “Well just apply ointment to it!” conversations blocking the grocery aisle than i’d want to recall)
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Some of the possibilities with haptic feedback are interesting. The article doesn’t dwell on it much but I see the potential to make devices that are much more useful for the visually impared.
The part that scares me though is that it talks about harvesting energy from vibrations, which means that before long we might have folks recharging their phones by cranking up the volume on their subwoofers:
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I wonder what the chances are of this being used for surreptitious sound recording? Think laser microphone but without the laser. Could be an exciting new vector for malware.
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Yeah, I suppose that an app on such a phone could potentially record audio even if you didn’t grant it permission to access the microphone.
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I did see someone in the grocery store wildly waving at his phone, which seemed odd until I realized that he was signing in a video call.
Huh, cool. And then the realization hit that cell phones were now useful for a whole class of people who previously had to use those clunky old TTD terminals. Awesome!
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The accessibility features on iPhones are really amazing and go all the way back to the original Mac (I’m sure Android has great features, too). My best buddy growing up is mostly blind and I always wanted to be able to buy him a Mac. He would get assistive devices from his support agency for reading books that were monstrously large and only really magnified the words. Assistive tech has always been a part of Apple’s dna and is usually featured in new product rollouts and ads.
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I’ve lost the ability to be hopeful about anything coming from our tech overlords.
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