- The latest attempt to dethrone the smartphone arrived this week.
- Humane, a startup founded in 2018, has released an AI pin that aims to offer an alternative.
- Reviews suggest, however, that it’s far from a smartphone killer.
Silicon Valley is struggling to imagine what the post-smartphone future might look like.
Since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world almost two decades ago, in 2007, no product has come as close to grabbing people’s attention as the handheld device.
Smartphone sales continue to grow, as data from Counterpoint Research shows: shipments increased 7% year-over-year in Q4 2023 to 323.2 million units, showing appetite remains strong for the devices that people live their lives with.
But for all their benefits, some have been inspired to discover life beyond smartphones.
Not only does their development stagnate with each new release, but the impact they can have on people’s sleep, the risk excessive use poses to children’s mental health, and the ease with which users accumulate time in front of a screen raise legitimate concerns.
This is why companies have made many attempts to offer an alternative.
Google tried to create $1,500 smart glasses in the 2010s, but failed miserably. Meta is trying to offer a more refined version with its Ray-Ban partnership. And now, in the age of AI, a new company is trying to create wearable pins for the future.
Unfortunately, it also feels like a dead end on the road to a post-smartphone future.
Humane, a startup founded in 2018 by husband-and-wife duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno – both former managers at Apple – has been working on an AI-enabled wearable pin that delivers smartphone functionality while eliminating the time of endless screen.
The Humane AI Pin’s promotional video may look impressive, but some viewers have pointed out that the device gives incorrect information. Human
As Humane says, “whether you’re making calls, sending messages, searching for answers, capturing moments, taking notes, or managing your digital world,” its pin should help you sort it out.
But after criticism of the first-generation version of its AI PIN was dropped this week, it’s clear that smartphone users will continue to be glued to their screens for some time.
The Pin, launched in the United States for $699 and considered the start of “ambient computing” by its founders, was described by The Verge as “an interesting idea that is so completely unfinished and so utterly broken by so much in unacceptable ways” that it is difficult to achieve. recommend.
In its review of the Pin, a device that requires a $24 monthly subscription to operate, the publication acknowledged that it looks pretty neat but falls short of almost everything else: It’s missing some features basic like an alarm, it had trouble making calls half the time, music. streaming falters.
Others had trouble uploading the high-resolution images they took with the Pin to Humane’s cloud storage service, and the AI aimed to make the Pin seem like a “second brain” and that she was “brain dead half the time”. Overheating also seems to be an issue for many reviewers.
For Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, a veteran journalist who has covered Apple and the smartphone market for years, the verdict seems that “the phone will be around much longer than some expected.”
Humane’s Bongiorno seems to have conceded this as well. Responding to Gurman on
Even Apple, which entered a new hardware market this year with the launch of its $3,500 Vision Pro, is positioning its mixed reality headset as a product that works in tandem with iPhones for Apple enthusiasts.
Don’t expect your pockets to get lighter anytime soon.
businessinsider
