Dave Rahardja<p>A friend of mine has a parent with Alzheimer’s, and they’ve had to walk them through problems and hiccups related to their tablet, which naturally has problems and hiccups because that’s how it is with complex <a href="https://sfba.social/tags/technology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>technology</span></a>.</p><p>And it got me thinking:</p><p>Whatever happened to videophones? Like, just phones, but with video, that does nothing else? For audio communications, we had wired phones, cordless phones, and super-basic cell phones that did ONE JOB (making voice calls) and did it extremely reliably, with no failure modes more complicated than “it’s physically broken, buy another one”. Why don’t we have the equivalent of that simple appliance, but for VIDEO CALLING?</p><p>My dad has a smartphone solely to make video calls with family, and because of that he has to deal with all the complexity associated with a general-purpose computing device, which he does not need.</p><p>The barrier of entry into video calling is too high. We need a single-use appliance.</p><p><a href="https://sfba.social/tags/retroComputing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>retroComputing</span></a> <a href="https://sfba.social/tags/futureTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>futureTech</span></a> <a href="https://sfba.social/tags/solarpunk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>solarpunk</span></a></p>