The AI Gadget Wave

When the iPhone was released in 2007, the then CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer told CNBC that the newly released iPhone “doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine”.¹

In fact, the opposite was true: by building interaction with the phone around using a touchscreen, Apple’s operating system changed the way we interact with personal technology. The design meant no fiddly buttons or accessories to lose, with an interface that provided a more intuitive relationship with the device.

For that reason, its adoption squashed the experimental side of mobile phone design (remember the Motorola Backflip? Or the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play?).² Fifteen or so years later, it seems the appetite for experimentation has returned, as developers look beyond touch interaction to reimagine the way we use our devices.³ 

But there’s a big challenge for those introducing these new ideas to the market. Humane and Rabbit’s high profile flops have shown that hype around innovation can only go so far against our fundamental expectations for functionality and usability. For that reason, they were immediately shown to be commercially unviable. However, taken as speculative design pieces, they challenge the longevity of visual-first interfaces and question what happens when we redesign interactions with digital objects. 

A significant reason it’s so difficult to refocus personal tech away from the touchscreen smartphone is because it forms the locus around which our digital lives are organised. 

Research by UCL shows that people rarely have a single point of access to the internet. Instead, we seamlessly move from device to device, depending on the time of day, the activity, and the context. Coining this the ‘Screen Ecology’, the researchers observed the interplay between several devices as people fluidly switched between or combined the usage of a wide range of technology including mobile phones, smart TVs, smart speakers, and laptops.⁴

Amongst it all, the smartphone acts as the key piece of hardware connecting many of these activities, because of its portability, accessibility, and versatility. For example, ask a smart speaker to play Spotify and the smartphone app will also update to display what’s playing, allowing the user to control the audio there as well. Whilst listening to the music, they can check their social media feeds, message friends, order takeaway, read the news, book a gym session, practise a foreign language, play a game of chess… the list goes on. 

On the flip side of the convenience of continuous access is, of course, the distraction of smartphones. It’s nothing new to point out how uneasy people are about spending large amounts of time using screens, particularly on their phones, and how powerless they feel to stop.⁵ 

This feeling has contributed to a rise in nostalgia for Y2K gadgets, from teenagers documenting parties with mid-2000s digital cameras to wired headphones becoming a Bella Hadid-approved fashion statement.⁶ HMD, the maker of Nokia phones, has even released a new version of the iconic 3210, bringing back a time “when conversations mattered more than likes and shares.” In these devices, the nostalgic aesthetic is reflected in distinctly reduced functionality (and so is the price - a new Nokia 3210 costs a tenth of the iPhone 15).⁷ 

But what if you could pack the vast functionality of a smartphone into a device that didn’t demand all of your time and attention? What if we could have the best of both worlds?

That’s the question that Humane and Rabbit tried to answer, with their Ai Pin and r1 gadgets respectively. Whilst Humane stuck to Apple’s tried and tested pebblification design technique, Rabbit leaned into the Y2K mood, with Tamagotchi stylings by buzzy studio Teenage Engineering.⁸ The spinning control wheel comes straight from the mid-noughties mobile experimentation playbook, that is, “utterly superfluous but fun to mess around with”.⁹ 

Beyond style though, these two gadgets are the same story in different fonts. Both designs explicitly show the user they need to be used in a new kind of way; both developers made grandiose claims about how their palm-sized devices would change the future of mobile technology; both utilise AI models to function; both were panned by reviewers on actual shipment.¹⁰

New technologies fail all the time for lesser reasons, and the myriad problems with these two have been (very) well documented. Mostly, they simply didn’t do what they promised. What isn’t being grappled with is the implications of speech control over touch control.

For starters, voice commands are inherently public. That’s clearly an obstacle for certain usages - for example, using an app to track bodily functions, like the menstrual cycle, or marking yourself out as a tourist by asking for directions in an unfamiliar place. In some cases, it might simply be rude to splice conversation with questions to a device. Equally, it raises entirely new etiquette questions - would it be socially acceptable to ask someone else’s Ai Pin a question?

Aside from privacy, there’s also significant brand equity attached to visuals, from the specific shade of Deliveroo blue to Spotify’s sound wave logo. How do brands show up in a sonic-only space? Taken to its logical conclusion, the best-pick model these devices propose takes decisions out of the hands of the user, negating the need for on-device branding at all whilst increasing the risk of monopolisation. 

Going back to the drawing board after these launches is clearly a necessity for both Humane, Rabbit and other challengers of touchscreen hegemony. That doesn’t mean the dedicated AI device is dead in the water, but it does mean developers and designers need to respond to the actual provocations the devices make - not just the ones they want it to.

If anything you've read here piques your interest, we'd love to hear from you at hello@poppins.agency

¹ https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-steve-ballmer-bosses-mocked-new-technologyand-got-it-wrong-2017-6

² https://www.slashgear.com/768938/the-strangest-android-phones-of-all-time/

³ https://www.wallpaper.com/tech/dial-into-the-boring-phone-and-more-smartphone-alternatives#section-4-boring-phone

⁴ Miller, Daniel, et al. The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology. UCL Press, 2021. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1b0fvh1. Accessed 7 May 2024.

⁵ https://www.reviews.org/mobile/cell-phone-addiction/, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230403-how-cellphones-have-changed-our-brains,  https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/45659-one-eight-britons-say-they-are-trying-use-their-ph

⁶ tttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/15/old-tech-is-the-best-tech/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2023/10/09/wired-it-girls-instagram-headphones-airpods-shelby-hull/, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/08/years-of-rapid-tech-change-and-the-pandemic-disruption-are-driving-a-wave-of-nostalgia

⁷ https://www.hmd.com/en_gb/nokia-3210?sku=1GF025CPD4L02

⁸ https://www.npr.org/2024/02/21/1232561606/ai-assistant-agent-rabbit

9 https://pocket-lint.com/phones/news/samsung/131841-the-weirdest-and-wackiest-mobile-phones-you-won-t-admit-you-owned/, https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147159/rabbit-r1-review-ai-gadget

¹⁰ https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147159/rabbit-r1-review-ai-gadget, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cljdnw77ge6o