Heavyweight smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung are using biometric capabilities like facial recognition as a selling point for their devices. But new research projects biometrics will be ubiquitous on smartphones in just a few years.

Source: Like It or Not, Smartphones with Biometrics Will Soon Be the Norm – eMarketer

Apple resorts to incrementalism at a time when we need new metaphors from which to build the smartphone’s ecosystem.

Source: What’s Really Missing From The iPhone X? A New Metaphor For Computing

I looked up through the skylight over my desk. Yep. That iPhone sky looked way better than the garbage regular sky that I could see through my garbage human eyes.

This enhancement of reality is what each video-streamed Apple event sells, more than any particular iPhone or set-top box. If advertising once told us that “Things go better with Coke,” this event — a jewel box for Apple’s products and the people who use them — says that “Things look better with Apple.”

Source: At the Apple Keynote, Selling Us a Better Vision of Ourselves – The New York Times

Smartphones have altered the texture of everyday life, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals, and transforming others beyond recognition.

Source: A Sociology of the Smartphone

At about 9pm on Tuesday, August 22 a hacker swapped his or her own SIM card with mine, presumably by calling T-Mobile. This, in turn, shut off network services to my phone and, moments later, allowed the hacker to change most of my Gmail passwords, my Facebook password, and text on my behalf. All of the two-factor notifications went, by default, to my phone number so I received none of them and in about two minutes I was locked out of my digital life.

Source: I was hacked | TechCrunch