标签: smartphone

Well, this is can be quite a shock and no mistake. I've been happily toddling along through life under the impression that the way in which I charge my iPad will prolong the life and efficiency of its battery. Now, however, it seems that my habits may be having the opposite effect (sad face).   This all started a few days ago when I evaluated some iClever USB chargers (see Meet my 4-Port beast of a USB charger ).   A roughty-toughty 4-port iClever charger (Source: Max Maxfield / EETimes.com)   As part of that column, I made the following comment: I don’t know if this is still true, but I remember being told that the batteries in things like iPads can exhibit a sort of "memory" effect that impacts their charging ability -- also, that it's best to let the charge fall to around 10% and to then recharge to 100% in a single sitting. I've informed my wife (Gina The Gorgeous) and my son (Joseph The All-Knowing) as to this charging philosophy on numerous occasions. As with most things, however, they haven’t paid the slightest attention to what I've had to say. On the contrary, they tend to charge their devices willy-nilly whenever they happen to come into close proximity with a charger and the mood takes them.   The embarrassing thing is that -- and I'm saying this in a hushed whisper with a brown paper bag over my head -- it turns out that their way of doing things may actually be better than mine. The way in which I discovered this niggling and nagging nugget of knowledge was when a reader, Roger46, posted the following comment to my USB charger column:   As a calculator design engineer in the 70s, I well remember memory effect when we were using NiCad rechargeable batteries. That and a rather high self-discharge rate. Lithium batteries seem to have moved past that era, fortunately (see this discussion about prolonging the life of modern batteries on BatteryUniversity.com). My personal experience seems to agree with their suggestions. My wife and I have had similar phones in the past. She tended to use hers until it ran down, while I liked to keep mine recharged as often as possible. She replaced the battery pack in one phone twice while I was still on the original with identical phones...   I immediately bounced over to see the discussions in question. Arrgggh! It seems that limiting oneself to partial discharges reduces stress and prolongs battery life. In Table 2 -- Cycle life as a function of discharge -- we discover that a 100% DoD (depth of discharge) results in only 300 to 500 discharge cycles; a 50% DoD offers 1,200 to 1,500 discharge cycles; and a 25% DoD provides 2,000 to 2,500 discharge cycles.   Now, remembering that -- viewing this simplistically -- 1,000 discharge cycles at 50% DoD equates to 500 discharge cycles at 100% DoD with regard to the service life of the battery, it seems to me that the 50% DoD offers the optimum lifetime of the aforementioned options. As usual, however, there's more to the story. I trotted over to see my chum Ivan in the next bay, because Ivan is a guru on all things related to power. Ivan noted that NiCad rechargeable batteries did indeed exhibit a memory effect and required a deep discharge in order to obtain the best results. Ivan also confirmed that the Lithium Ion batteries used in today's smartphones and tablet computers no longer suffer from this effect (the batteries in your notepad computer and/or batteries of different Lithium chemistries may be another story).   Ivan also proffered a few more sage words of advice. He noted that elevated temperatures also affect battery life and that, running one's iPad (for example) at full whack will cause the battery to warm up a tad. The point is that charging the battery when it's already warm is not a great idea; it's better to wait a while and then charge the device when it's cooled down.   But wait, there's more. Once the battery has reached 100% charge, that's a good time to stop charging it -- continuing to trickle-charge a Lithium Ion battery (like leaving it plugged into the charger overnight) can also degrade its performance over time. Of course, this depends on the sophistication of the charger and/or the thing being charged.   Peeking inside a cheap-and-cheerful smartphone charger (Source: Max Maxfield / EETimes.com)   More sophisticated chargers will take the environment into account and properly terminate charging at the optimal point. Some chargers are so smart they can determine the battery's chemistry and make any appropriate adjustments. Similarly, more sophisticated devices will recognize when their batteries are chock-a-block full, at which point they will stop drawing power from the charger.   The bottom line is that I will be changing my charging habits henceforth. I'm not going to become going to try to not become obsessive compulsive about this, but I am going to start charging my iPad when it reaches 50% DoD. Also, if I've been doing something compute-intensive like watching videos or running a simulation, I'm going to give the little scamp time to cool down before commencing the recharge process. (I will do all of this until devices evolve to using different battery chemistries, at which point everything will have to be re-evaluated like déjà vu all over again.) How about you? Will what you've read here change your modus operandi vis-à-vis charging your smartphone and tablet?   Max Maxfield

A snippet in the life of a cubicle rat.....   Ask any engineer about the biggest time-wasters at work, and odds are meetings will be near the top of his or her list.   Engineers are hardly alone – their feeling are widely shared across the broader workforce. Among the reasons given in a 2012 employee survey by Business New Daily were: meetings that don't start on time, stay on track or finish on time; meetings with no clear purpose or objective; or meetings that are boring or provide no new or interesting information.   The number one annoyance, though, was allowing attendees to ramble on, repeating comments and thoughts.   If you're caught in such a meeting, you might wonder whether you can find a way to skip the meeting entirely next time, without being seen as "not a team player". Here are few suggestions – not that I ever tried these myself.   One time-honored approach is to fake being sick. This is a popular choice – in a 2014 study , 30% of employees said they had called in sick even though they felt fine. The most popular reason? They were "sick" of work.   An obvious problem with this approach - you may only want to get out of one particular meeting, not the whole day.   One option is to come to work, then be laid low just before the meeting in question. If you decide to try this method, this site offers a selection of plausible ailments. Nothing life-threatening, though - no need to unduly alarm your colleagues.   If this seems a little extreme, keep reading because technology offers other more elegant options.   If you're at a remote site and calling in via a conference call, you've got it made - check out figure 1.   Figure 1 Why nobody is listening to your presentation (source: Intercall/HBR)   A modified version of this strategy works well if the meeting is early or late and you can call in from your car – add in cellphone dead zones and the possibilities are endless. On the advice of counsel, though, we suggest you park before attempting any of the activities listed above.   If you can't avail yourself of this get-out-of-jail-free card, move to Plan B (or is it C?).   Got a laptop? Of course, you need to bring it to the meeting – might miss an important meeting notice, right? Having chosen the right seat (nobody behind you) and carefully oriented your screen to prevent unwanted snooping, salvation is a mere click away.   No laptop? Two words – Smart. Phone.   Unfortunately, this method does require your physical presence. But nothing else. Don't forget the coffee .   Salvation takes many forms – CNN and the BBC are both solid choices. Or the UC Berkeley Philosophy Department website, a personal favorite.   Wait a minute - isn't it Fantasy Football season?   Although I've never faked sickness to avoid a meeting (as far as I can recall), I do have personal experience of the efficacy of the laptop/cellphone method.   At a weekly group meeting some years ago, after a particularly tedious progress report from a colleague, our manager asked if anyone had any comments.   Silence. I looked around the room. Every single person was deep inside their laptop or smartphone.   Except me, naturally.   Because I'm a team player.   Paul Pickering is an engineer

Although the term "smart phone" first appeared in print in 1995, describing ATT's "PhoneWriter Communicator" as a "smart phone," it was the indomitable Steve Jobs who forcefed it into our vocabulary and consciousness 12 years later. "Smart phone" has stuck ever since with no contender to replace the ubiquitous name.   Steve Jobs, and most of the world’s population didn’t know then, and may not know now how extraordinarily powerful, useful, and essential the smartphone of 2016 is going to be.   That’s the good news. The bad news is that less sophisticated marketing types, looking for the sound bites to excite the news tonight, will declare inaccurate heights, and in some cases give consumers the frights. Smartphones are going to seem intelligent, but they will not be thinking machines, just very, very well-trained, adaptive, and adaptable devices with multi-sensor inputs.   As a result of the digestion of hordes of data collected by the device and other sources, processed on the device, and sorted in the device and/or the cloud, our personal companions are going to appear to be intuitive. The result will be better experiences and interactions with our devices and the world at large.   The goal of the device builders and their processor and application suppliers is to bring a more human-like understanding to the device so we users are not aware that we are dealing with a machine, as I am fond of saying, the technology works when it disappears.   When we can teach our devices to respond to us, in a manner we prefer, which will be different for each and every user, we’ll have a human-like relationship. But as long as the device and apps have to train us on how to deal with them, it’s still just an annoying machine that heats up our pockets and frustrates us as we try to deal with it while dealing with three other things simultaneously.   The device builders and their suppliers understand this and are taking steps to improve the situation, and they are working at warp speed — you are going to be amazed at the development over the next 18 months. Feeling secure One of the major components of those developments will be better personal security. The smartphone of 2016 will have twice the local memory of today’s devices, and more than twice the capacity for plug in memory.   The memory will be faster, and use less power. That’s item one in the improved security — keep your stuff locally, and privately. The industry emphasizes the need for more processing on the cloud and ignores the need for on-device processing, our future smartphones will do more and store more locally.   The access to the local data will be biologically unique, with multifactor biometric authentication, including eyes, face, voice, touch, and maybe even heartbeat.   If you choose to share your data, the uplinks and downlinks will be so fast you’ll barely think about them. That’s both the good news and the bad. If it’s too easy and too fast, you may inadvertently share something you didn’t intend to. That’s where intelligent behavioral analysis comes to play.   If your devices have learned your patterns, and know who your friends and trusted sources/sites are, then there will be little to no challenge. But if you do something erratic, unpredictable, or potentially dangerous, then the action will be challenged.   We will come to expect our devices to see, hear and understand their surroundings through technologies such as computer vision, directional audio, sensor fusion and machine learning. And from that data infer context, anticipate needs, and take appropriate actions through technologies, such as, always-on sensing and on-device machine learning.   Smartphone cameras won’t only capture a high-quality image and see it as millions of individual pixels, but will also understand the image, recognize objects, understand the scene, figure out context, etc. In this new paradigm, camera is not just capturing pixels, but understand them.   The expanded sensor array in the next generation smartphones will be extraordinary. Our phones will view the world in 3D, and collect information about things in 3D, with information about how far things are from us, and their rate of travel toward or away from us. Imagine your phone telling you, “might as well stop running, you can’t catch that bus.”   Augmented reality won’t be a novelty, it will be automatic and active anytime the phone senses it is not in your pocket, purse or briefcase. The AR in the phone of 2016 will constantly tell you stuff about your surroundings, and not just annoying ad-driven messages for taco stands and gas stations, but notifications about things you care about and are interested in.   If they get in the way you’ll simply say, “That’s enough Igor,” or, “stop it Igor,” you won’t have to tell Igor what to do in an exact construct of speech that Igor tried to train you to use, Igor will understand your intentions, and behave accordingly — a true personal companion. Never lonely, never uncomfortable These technologies, techniques, and concepts will spread beyond the personal companion. You’ll find them in your home, car, retail stores, and other things that you contact. Due to the massive manufacturing scale of mobile devices, processors, sensors, and associated components, parts are very inexpensive while providing amazing processing capabilities. It’s the democratization of technology and the sharing of it that will enrich our lives overall.   Our cars will behave smarter, more sensitive to our needs, comfort, and most of all safety. And our homes will be more aware of our presence, both coming and going, the ambient conditions inside and out, and adjust itself for our comfort while observing energy management protocols. Imagine the house getting a message from your phone alerting it to your arrival in 10 minutes.   The house checks the outside temperature and wind-chill factor and sets up the heaters in the rooms it knows you first use when you come home. The phone also gives the house your agenda for the day, and the house, with the phone’s help, sees that in addition to having fought with rush-hour traffic for the past 45 minutes, you were in a stressful, over-extended meeting with your boss. Aha says the house I better put on some soothing music, he probably won’t want to hear Machine Head tonight.   Consumer suppliers will send complex computer graphics models to your TV and/or mobile device so you can see high fidelity and faithfully reproduced examples of products you are interested in.   The technologies to enable these ideas are getting ready to make this a reality. All the great ideas that have been proposed over the past 20 years for the technological life of the future are remarkably close to being realized. For example, the advancements in machine learning, computer vision and other cognitive technologies.   It is due largely to the smartphone, its broad acceptance, and the manufacturing volume of complex electronic parts and associated software. And the processors and sensors will operate at remarkably low power while doing it. As usage and number of sensors continually increase (a dozen of sensors in your smartphone today), ultra-low power sensor processing will be essential.   Love triangle Your smartphone could become a threat to your relationships. People have commented, “my phone knows me better than my husband/wife.” A Survey (by Brandon McDaniel of The Pennsylvania State University and Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University in Utah) found that almost three quarters of women in committed relationships feel that smartphones are interfering with their love life and are reducing the amount of time they spend with their partner.   Jon Peddie is president of Jon Peddie Research (Tiburon, Calif), a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm.

Last April 21, NASA launched a novel programme, putting into orbit three satellites that employ an off-the-shelf commercial smartphone as the control system. The satellites hitched a ride on the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. Each of the three "phonesats" was a 10-centimeter cube with a mass of about 1kg. The trio operated in orbit for about a week, transmitting back down to Earth. The satellite orbits naturally decayed after about one week, as expected, and they re-entered Earth's atmosphere on April 27. According to Chad Frost, chief of the Mission Design Division at NASA's Ames Research Center, the success of the mission was an important milestone. Building a spacecraft of any sort generally means using very expensive hardware and software, Frost said. But PhoneSat—comparatively very inexpensive—breaks the mould. According to Frost, this concept could be used to deploy groups of satellites to, for example, monitor space weather or conditions in various parts of the Earth. "We were very intrigued by the notion that you could build a very low-cost spacecraft based entirely on a smartphone and other consumer electronics devices," Frost said. According to Frost, the PhoneSat project—which won Popular Science's 2012 Best of What's New Award for innovation in aerospace—proved exactly what he and his colleagues at NASA had hoped for: "That you can build a spacecraft for orders of magnitude less" than what it typically takes. Frost said NASA is now seriously looking at several PhoneSat concepts that could include hundreds or even thousands of spacecraft working in conjunction to provide, for example, a space weather early warning system or other such networks for monitoring. Since the PhoneSat project utilises the Android operating system, it opens up the possibility of apps being created by the global Android developer community being used in space, Frost said. He called the concept "wide open and wildly exciting." Advances in electronics The idea of basing a satellite on a smartphone wouldn't be possible without advances made in smartphones over the past few years, Frost noted. "We've driven consumer electronics to the point where they are just amazingly capable little devices and ridiculously affordable for what they can do," he said. Frost has been at the forefront of aerospace technology for more than 25 years. He joined the Army/NASA joint rotorcraft division in 1997. In in years at NASA, both electronics and spacecraft technology have come a long way. "I'm part of the generation that first started to get their hands on the first computers," Frost said. He added that some of the earliest projects he worked on as an engineer still used analogue control systems. The fundamental revolution, he said, beginning with Apollo, was the move to digital flight control. A swarm of advanced and affordable nanosatellites for a coordinated science mission demonstration. Source: NASA The culmination of the digital revolution is "flying these smartphones and other systems that have amazing computational power, ridiculously low power consumer, and are insanely inexpensive," Frost said. "I see the revolution in electronics as being the thing that has most fundamentally transformed what we can do and what we will be able to do in the future," Frost said. "There are other things coming along that will be very exciting and powerful, but I don't know that they will dominate the landscape the way microelectronics can."   Dylan McGrath EE Times

Most smart phones these days come fitted with Gorilla Glass—a scratch resistant and toughened glass. But exactly how tough is it? Can you safely drop your device? What about all the shrapnel in my pockets—will they scratch or damage my beloved smart phone? There still seems to be plenty of confusion out there as to just how safe a device is with just Gorilla Glass protecting the display. A simple search for whether or not you still need a screen protector with Gorilla Glass returns a variety of opinions. To help end some of the doubt Erica Griffin has made a video for XDA Developer TV . In the video, Erica not only answers many of life's great Gorilla Glass questions, but she also spends some time describing the process used to manufacture the Gorilla Glass. Having done all that, she performs several tests to see what kind of materials will scratch the glass and how badly. There are also several attempts to crack the display of a Samsung Galaxy Note using, among other things, carpet, hard floor, concrete and, perhaps most spectacularly, under the wheels of a moving car! It's interesting to see where the Gorilla Glass fares well and where it really doesn't; making it clearer to users where they may need extra protection for the display of their device. Watch this video and see for yourselves. - Paul Hunnisett Paul is an Android developer and geek extraordinaire, with a passion for playing with both hardware and software, based out of Bristol in the UK. With his take-no-prisoners reviewing style, Paul's teardowns and biting analysis are a must read. Hackers, tinkerers and coders, Paul has your weekly fix.