Android By Russell Holly Aug. 14, 2014 12:30 pm
We all know that jumping from your current smartphone*to a shiny new one*can be a jarring experience. In the two years you had your old*phone the mobile industry made tremendous strides, improving nearly every aspect of the device… and you were sitting on the sidelines! It’s an unfortunate, but inevitable, set of circumstances.
Technology is always moving forward, and when it comes to smartphones sometimes the pace of improvement can be incredible. To help you prepare, here’s a quick breakdown of the next generation smartphone tech that you should be looking out for.
[h=3]Synthetic sapphire[/h]We’re already starting to see some parts of our smartphones using this tech, but there’s a very real chance it will become a standard before too long. The most fragile part of your phone is the screen and the camera cover, because they are both made out of glass. In most cases today, the glass being used is specially treated to withstand certain kinds of impacts and scratches. We have yet to eliminate that soul-crushing feeling associated with picking your phone up off the ground to find a spider web of cracks across the screen, however, so there’s plenty of room to improve.
Synthetic sapphire is significantly more scratch- and impact-resistant than glass, and it can be made to be just as transparent and functional for our phones. Replacing the glass parts of our devices with high-tech materials should dramatically reduce the cases of accidental damage that renders hardware unusable.
Phones like the Kyocera Brigadier already uses a sapphire display, and there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that the iPhone 6 will be sporting this same technology. Of the many things headed to the next generation of smartphones, this is one worth paying special attention to.
[h=3]Reversible connectors[/h]Fumbling around with your USB cable to plug in your smartphone isn’t just a minor annoyance — you run the risk of actually damaging your handset*by guessing wrong and applying too much force. Breaking your power port is a death sentence for your phone, but*there’s not much that can be done to make the connection between the power port and phone more durable. In order to move forward, we need to adopt a better standard for plugging in.
Apple has lead the way with this sort of tech thanks to their proprietary Lightning port, but before long there will be USB options that offer the same peace of mind. Reversible USB ports, like the one being finalized right now, are a huge deal. It’s one of those things that doesn’t sound that important, right up until you realize you no longer have to think or be careful when inserting a cable.
[h=3]Category 6 LTE[/h]In our constant search for having the very best of everything, future-proofing is often more important than anything else. Your next phone should be really great when you get it, but it should be able to stay relatively current during that two year period. While making sure you have the ability to access those super fast LTE networks is a big deal, there’s a specific kind of LTE radio that will make sure your phone stays connected to the fastest networks for a little while.
Category 6 LTE devices are capable of upload and download speeds that are significantly greater than any of the LTE networks from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint are selling you right now. These radios will work exactly the same as every other LTE radio if you were to buy a phone with this tech in it tomorrow, but in a year from now when these mobile networks are competing to see who can offer the fastest mobile network your next smartphone should be able to take advantage of the situation.
[h=3]Wireless charging (no, really, this time it’s different)[/h]For the last couple of years there have been multiple smartphones and tablets capable of wireless charging. It’s a fantastic concept, but the execution so far really is lacking. There have been super cool wireless chargers like Google’s Orb charger, but there’s not yet been a great universal wireless charging solution that works for everyone. Also, you have to have this little pad to set your phone or tablet on just right in order to start the charging. It’s not any more or less convenient than plugging your phone in, at least not yet.
The Qi standard has been updated to version 1.2, and one of the things that makes this update important is the ability to charge wireless without direct contact. This means there’s a good chance that, in the not-so-distant future, you’d be able to walk into a Starbucks and notice that your phone is charging just by setting it down on the table. This is the kind of thing that wireless charging as a concept has desperately needed, and will soon become a reality.
[h=3]Wideband audio and VoLTE support[/h]As our mobile networks improve, things like call quality will grow considerably. Most smartphones boast high quality microphones for things like recording audio, but not all of them can take that HD audio experience and push it over a network to the person on the other end of a phone call. While not every mobile network supports the protocol yet, there’s a feature called wideband audio (sometimes also called HD voice) that you should make sure is a part of your next phone.
Taking things one step further, as LTE networks begin to take up more of the coverage map than 3G and 2G networks there will be some efforts to move calls onto these 4G networks. Voice over LTE (or VoLTE for short) is something that is only useful once these features are made available by the carrier, but being able to take advantage of these features is something you should keep in mind.
[h=3]And the list goes on…[/h]There’s plenty of other really cool features to consider when planning your next smartphone purchase. Those explained above are definitely happening, but what else can we look forward to when the tech is ready? Screen projection, holograms, flexible displays, and a yet more work to make the handsets thinner I’d imagine.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what we’ll be carrying around 10 years from now.
More...
Technology is always moving forward, and when it comes to smartphones sometimes the pace of improvement can be incredible. To help you prepare, here’s a quick breakdown of the next generation smartphone tech that you should be looking out for.
[h=3]Synthetic sapphire[/h]We’re already starting to see some parts of our smartphones using this tech, but there’s a very real chance it will become a standard before too long. The most fragile part of your phone is the screen and the camera cover, because they are both made out of glass. In most cases today, the glass being used is specially treated to withstand certain kinds of impacts and scratches. We have yet to eliminate that soul-crushing feeling associated with picking your phone up off the ground to find a spider web of cracks across the screen, however, so there’s plenty of room to improve.
Synthetic sapphire is significantly more scratch- and impact-resistant than glass, and it can be made to be just as transparent and functional for our phones. Replacing the glass parts of our devices with high-tech materials should dramatically reduce the cases of accidental damage that renders hardware unusable.
Phones like the Kyocera Brigadier already uses a sapphire display, and there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that the iPhone 6 will be sporting this same technology. Of the many things headed to the next generation of smartphones, this is one worth paying special attention to.
[h=3]Reversible connectors[/h]Fumbling around with your USB cable to plug in your smartphone isn’t just a minor annoyance — you run the risk of actually damaging your handset*by guessing wrong and applying too much force. Breaking your power port is a death sentence for your phone, but*there’s not much that can be done to make the connection between the power port and phone more durable. In order to move forward, we need to adopt a better standard for plugging in.
Apple has lead the way with this sort of tech thanks to their proprietary Lightning port, but before long there will be USB options that offer the same peace of mind. Reversible USB ports, like the one being finalized right now, are a huge deal. It’s one of those things that doesn’t sound that important, right up until you realize you no longer have to think or be careful when inserting a cable.
[h=3]Category 6 LTE[/h]In our constant search for having the very best of everything, future-proofing is often more important than anything else. Your next phone should be really great when you get it, but it should be able to stay relatively current during that two year period. While making sure you have the ability to access those super fast LTE networks is a big deal, there’s a specific kind of LTE radio that will make sure your phone stays connected to the fastest networks for a little while.
Category 6 LTE devices are capable of upload and download speeds that are significantly greater than any of the LTE networks from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint are selling you right now. These radios will work exactly the same as every other LTE radio if you were to buy a phone with this tech in it tomorrow, but in a year from now when these mobile networks are competing to see who can offer the fastest mobile network your next smartphone should be able to take advantage of the situation.
[h=3]Wireless charging (no, really, this time it’s different)[/h]For the last couple of years there have been multiple smartphones and tablets capable of wireless charging. It’s a fantastic concept, but the execution so far really is lacking. There have been super cool wireless chargers like Google’s Orb charger, but there’s not yet been a great universal wireless charging solution that works for everyone. Also, you have to have this little pad to set your phone or tablet on just right in order to start the charging. It’s not any more or less convenient than plugging your phone in, at least not yet.
The Qi standard has been updated to version 1.2, and one of the things that makes this update important is the ability to charge wireless without direct contact. This means there’s a good chance that, in the not-so-distant future, you’d be able to walk into a Starbucks and notice that your phone is charging just by setting it down on the table. This is the kind of thing that wireless charging as a concept has desperately needed, and will soon become a reality.
[h=3]Wideband audio and VoLTE support[/h]As our mobile networks improve, things like call quality will grow considerably. Most smartphones boast high quality microphones for things like recording audio, but not all of them can take that HD audio experience and push it over a network to the person on the other end of a phone call. While not every mobile network supports the protocol yet, there’s a feature called wideband audio (sometimes also called HD voice) that you should make sure is a part of your next phone.
Taking things one step further, as LTE networks begin to take up more of the coverage map than 3G and 2G networks there will be some efforts to move calls onto these 4G networks. Voice over LTE (or VoLTE for short) is something that is only useful once these features are made available by the carrier, but being able to take advantage of these features is something you should keep in mind.
[h=3]And the list goes on…[/h]There’s plenty of other really cool features to consider when planning your next smartphone purchase. Those explained above are definitely happening, but what else can we look forward to when the tech is ready? Screen projection, holograms, flexible displays, and a yet more work to make the handsets thinner I’d imagine.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what we’ll be carrying around 10 years from now.
More...
