Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are building the future, but your smartphone still isn’t going anywhere | Business Insider

Photo: Matt Weinberger

Matt Weinberger, tech reporter based in San Francisco says, "Many people — myself included — have high, high hopes for new tech like Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant, or the Microsoft HoloLens hologram headset, to usher in a new era beyond the smartphone.

Apple CEO Tim Cook
Photo: Getty

But even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos thinks that future is a long time coming.

In a recent interview, Bezos said that with shopping, Alexa is only really "good for reordering consumables, where you don't have to make a lot of choices, but most online shopping is going to be facilitated by having a display."

He's not wrong, either. If you're buying anything more complicated than toilet paper, using an Amazon Echo or Google Home to buy stuff is about as much fun as having a friend read you the Costco catalog over the phone. Anything else, and you still need to sit down in front of a phone, tablet, or computer. 

Snapchat Spectacles
Photo: Snapchat

Similarly, the most mainstream augmented reality hardware to date, Snapchat's video-taking Spectacles, are a stripped-down experience that require a smartphone to edit and share video. Meanwhile, companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft have made great strides in building standalone augmented reality headsets — but they've both run into roadblocks on the way to getting that tech down to a consumer-friendly level of price and performance.
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Source: Business Insider