If you were to believe everything you read, smartphones – the prime technology interface for anyone selling B2C – will soon be dead.
OpenAI, working with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive, has announced a new product that will fit in your pocket, doesn’t have a screen and is ‘context sensitive’. The developers believe this will become the ‘third core device’, replacing much of the reason for ever touching a phone. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describe it as the ‘coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen,’ due for launch in 2026 or 2027.
We can be a little sceptical here. Remember the Segway: something that was going to transform personal transportation, but ended up as much a joke as its spiritual predecessor the Sinclair C5. And then there are smart glasses. Back in 2020, a book called The Infinite Retina predicted that by 2025 we would have dumped our other screens for spectacles capable of augmented and virtual reality.
Virtual reality (VR) replaces the entire view with generated imagery – acting like a screen that’s worn – while augmented reality (AR) overlays computer-generated material on the real-world view, like a car’s head-up display or games such as Pokémon Go. If the book had been right, every business would be redesigning their systems by now – great news for software developers, but a significant expense.
Here we are in 2025, and the AR/VR revolution has not arrived. It’s true that, for instance, Google seems to have made significant strides with their Aria Gen 2 research project compared with the Google Glass product first available in 2013, which was clumsy, overpriced and considered by many to be socially unacceptable. Yet there will still be privacy concerns over smart glasses, and more to the point there are lots of things we use phones for where augmented reality adds very little.
On the plus side, AR makes mapping software easier to use when walking – but think of the dozens of actions you take when using a computer or smartphone. It’s hard to see how most of them would be helped by AR, whether it be online shopping, booking a restaurant, paying contactless, listening to music, watching videos, sending texts, writing documents, handling spreadsheets… and far more.
The heavier duty VR headsets, such as Apple’s Vision Pro, are fine for gaming, but although they are now able to reproduce a screen to an acceptable level of detail, they come up against the reality that most of us don’t want a large device clamped to our faces all day.
Phones remain the easiest practical way for customers to access businesses and their product offerings, while computers are still the best options for internal business use. Smart speakers were touted, like OpenAI’s planned product, as a third core device that could be used for shopping and far more. But in reality, most of us use smart speakers to play music, get to basic information and as kitchen timers. They haven’t taken over because phones are with us all the time and have the high-bandwidth communication provided by a screen and interaction with voice and fingers.
While the Altman/Ive device (or family of devices) could indeed bring a higher level of AI to your interactions with the world around you, it’s hard to see how that too will wean us away from our screens (themselves featuring rapidly advancing AI capabilities).
At some point we may find the next big thing that will transform our capability to interface with information – which in the end is what phones and computers do for us today. But it’s hard to believe that either OpenAI’s mysterious project or smart glasses will be the answer. And for now, phones and computers will remain a business’s prime mechanism for interacting with data and their customers.