Smartphones are a huge productivity tool, that's why they took off in the first place. Especially Blackberry, which offered the magic technology of accessing your email and calendar from anywhere. The ads are not an obstacle to this, especially not on iPhone.

They are far more than that. For a large number of people, the smartphone is their first and only computing device. Enabling internet access is like rocket fuel for advancing socioeconomic conditions for those in developing nations.

Entire generations have been lifted from poverty due to it.

And "first and only computing device" pales to insignificance next to "first and only bank account" which they also are, in a way. That's huge.

I don't know about you, but a consumption-only "first and only computing device" sounds incredibly dystopian. I get that they have a positive impact, but it feels like we could be doing better.

> I don't know about you, but a consumption-only "first and only computing device" sounds incredibly dystopian

Smartphones aren’t consumption-only.

Doing anything but consumption and lightweight content discovery on smartphones is basically a farce. They are not usable as general-purpose creation machines.

> Doing anything but consumption and lightweight content discovery on smartphones is basically a farce.

I disagree, even when talkingn about a smartphone as a human interface device and not, as was the actual context of the thread, a computing device.

Having a, say, DeX-enabled Android (or even potentially powered by fairly traditional Linux, if one doesn’t just use a major maker device with stock software) smartphone as a computing device doesn’t preclude standard desktop I/O devices fo interact with it in manner very similar to a standard desktop PC.

> They are not usable as general-purpose creation machines.

Again, as an exclusive computing device, they are just about as much as is any computing device.

Even as an exclusive HID, there’s a giant excluded middle between “consumption only” and “not usable as general purpose creation machines”.

What makes a smartphone a smartphone is the ability to use it with just the touchscreen. A smartphone with desktop peripherals is just that, a desktop. What I am arguing is that a bare smartphone (aka what most of those people in the developing world can afford) cannot meaningfully serve, due to being a form factor with a very imprecise input method, as a creation platform for any sort of precise content.

> What makes a smartphone a smartphone is the ability to use it with just the touchscreen

You seem to be conflating the ability to be used with a limited interface with a restriction to be used with only a particular interface. I desktop PC has the ability to be used without a graphics tablet. It would be a much more limited creation device if it were restricted to being used without one. And the same is true of everything that isn’t a touchscreen, microphone, or other built in human interface and smartphones. But a smartphone as an exclusive computing device does not imply the limitations of its built-in interfaces, since having external interfaces is also a standard feature of the class.

While I agree with your definitions of what a computation device is, I also don't see Android being developed on Android in the near future. So many UX conceptual problems won't allow this, so I think that as long as computers are required to build smartphones, they cannot be described as "general purpose" machines.

Its still a poor version of the internet when compared to a PC (laptop/Desktop).

That world cant exist. A flaw of anti capitalist alternatives is that they're non-natural.

Any alternative where trade didn't follow optimal path is due to regulation / force. And in most, the force required to steer humans away from their nature also kills innovation.

Ergo: you cant have a miracle chip in your pocket with no one using it to sell you potato chips.

1. Nobody mentioned capitalism or alternatives in the parent comment.

2. Capitalism is not "natural" either and only started developing in the post-renaissance world.

3. Natural selection demonstrates conclusively that relying on purely natural processes to drive "innovation" often lead to highly non-optimal and harmful trends.

4. Most of the major scientific and technological innovations of the 20th century were either the direct result of or funded by "force" which I take to mean government.

5. Advertisement was not the only monetisation strategy that the internet and telecommunication industry could have taken. The internet could have very easily gone down the subscription route and the only reason why anybody thinks otherwise is because of the decade long marketing that has normalised getting everything for "free".