"Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery", Mickens:

"Mobile computing researchers are a special kind of menace. They don’t smuggle rockets to Hezbollah, or clone baby seals and then make them work in sweatshops for pennies a day. That’s not the problem with mobile computing people. The problem with mobile computing people is that they have no shame. They write research papers with titles like “Crowdsourced Geolocation-based Energy Profiling for Mobile Devices,” as if the most urgent deficiency of smartphones is an insufficient composition of buzzwords. The real problem with mobile devices is that they are composed of Satan. They crash all of the time, ignore our basic commands, and spend most of their time sullen, quiet, and confused, draining their batteries and converting the energy into waste heat and thwarted dreams. Smartphones and tablets have essentially become the new printers: things that do not work, and are not expected to work, and whose primary purpose is to inspire gothic conversations about the ultimate futility of the human condition. People buy mobile devices for the same reason that goldfish swim in their tiny bowls: it’s something to do while we wait for death.

...Let me describe just a few of the problems with mobile devices:
Mobile browsers: When I use a mobile browser to load a web page, I literally have no expectation that anything will ever happen. A successful page load is so unlikely, so unimaginable, that mobile browsers effectively exist outside of causality—the browser is completely divorced from all action verbs, and can only be associated with sad, falling-tone sentences like “I had to give up after twenty seconds.” The only reason that I use mobile browsers is that I hate myself and I want to be attritioned into unconsciousness by the desperate, spastic gasps of my browser as it struggles to download the 87 MB of Flash and JavaScript that are contained in any website made after the Civil War. Of course, some web pages are “mobile-enabled,” meaning that they only contain 63 MB of things that I don’t care about, instead of 87 MB of things I don’t care about.
...Touchscreens: When touchscreens work, they’re amazing; however, touchscreens are the only commodities which depreciate faster than automobiles. As soon as you unwrap your phone or tablet, the touchscreen starts to die. Make no mistake, your initial touchscreen romance will be lovely and full. Hark!—as you effortlessly move neon blobs of information like a character from “Tron”! Behold!—as you zoom into and out of a dynamically resizable thing that contains additional- but-only-partially-resizable things! Such experiences represent the springtime of your love, and the initial weeks of your touch­ screen romance will be like a young Led Zeppelin, intense and grandiose and punctuated by extended guitar solos. However, at some point, you will drop your phone or your tablet, and this will mark the beginning of the end. When you drop a touchscreen, you initiate a complex series of degenerative processes that corrupt the touchscreen and turn its will against you like a pet lizard who has learned that dinosaurs were real BUT IT’S JUST A STATE OF MIND. Note that, when I say that you will “drop” your touchscreen, I do not mean “drop” in the layperson sense of “to release from a non-trivial height onto a hard surface.” I mean “drop” in the sense of “to place your touchscreen on any surface that isn’t composed of angel feathers and the dreams of earnest schoolchildren.” Phones and tablets apparently require Planck-scale mechanical alignments, such that merely looking at the touchscreen introduces fundamental, quantum dynamical changes in the touchscreen’s dilithium crystals. Thus, if you place your touchscreen on anything, ever, you have made a severe and irreversible life mistake. Slowly but surely, your touchscreen will develop a series of tics and glitches, behaviors that you will initially explain away
...On your touchscreen, your swipes will become pinches, and your pinches will become scrolls, and each one of your scrolls will become a complex thing never before seen on this earth, a leviathan meta-touch event of such breadth and complexity that your phone can only respond like Carrie White at the prom.
...Similarly, a mobile phone should be able to PHONE PEOPLE while being MOBILE. However, I have never had a successful conversation on a mobile phone. Whenever I talk to people on a mobile phone, they always sound distant and/ or creepy, like they’re trapped in an echo-filled cave, or a windy cave, or a cave that makes people sound like pedophiles. These are not good caves to be in, to the extent that it’s ever good to be in a cave. Nobody takes their honeymoon at Persistently Distracting Echo Cave. Nobody has their Bat Mitzvah at Windy Cave’s 80% Packet Loss Ballroom. You may, in fact, find online travel deals for Pedo-Cave, but these are all traps that have been set by “To Catch A Predator.” My point is that mobile phones are not phones...This is why, when you try to talk to someone on a mobile phone, you are thrown into a frantic world of on-the-fly lossy decompression, like Nicholas Cage in that movie about Navajo code talkers (the only movie that managed to simultaneously offend Native Americans, cryptographers, and people who are neither Native Americans nor cryptographically inclined).

...Conclusion

In the minds of mobile computing researchers, humanity is nearing a final, glorious stage of Darwinian evolution, in which mankind and smartphones emerge from a shared chrysalis and transform into shapeless, omnipotent joy clouds of excellence and victory, unconstrained by conventional morality or finite battery life. In reality, you could go to the Middle Ages, find a random person, and take whatever is in his left pocket, and you would have something that is more useful than a modern mobile device (although it may be covered with Bubonic plague or antiquated notions about the stoning of random villagers with respect to the actual size of the witch population)."

#humor