Getting a smartphone is almost as commonplace today as obtaining new cell phone service. Hardware and software problems are both things that plague the smartphone market, but phones’ evolution has been more helpful than problematic. The fact that these devices can do what they do at all is an incredible leap of technology, and they are getting far better as time goes by. Understanding the development of these technologies and a little history is a good way to understand and know that the ultimate device is coming.
The smartphones of yesterday were big and used a lot of power. The most common chips used had weak graphics and slow processing speed, but the big, power hungry screens were the main problem. Larger batteries had to be made to keep up with the demand, and they made the products even larger. Although the efficiency of these devices did evolve, it did so at a slow rate due to the elevated power requirements of next gen chipsets. The previous devices’ software and hardware hindered the performance significantly, but the release of the iPhone marked a new evolution in portable technology.
Powerful hardware and software were huge advancements the iPhone introduced to the world. One of the major things was the progression of their System On a Chip (SOC), bringing an incredibly powerful graphics card to the table. Many smartphones before were not optimized, given their modest market share, but shortly afterward, Android was introduced, and became the first solid competitor to the iPhone. Many manufacturers started to see how profitable the market could become, and started designing more efficient and strong SOCs to place into their own phones.
Balancing battery life and performance has been a huge problem because of the way SOCs operate. These SOCs have had problems saving power given that they have to dynamically increase and decrease speed to balance power and life of the battery. The power savings that these devices get using this approach has been minimal, and software programmers have to make a decision between power and battery. Tomorrow’s Tegra 3 chipset comes with extraordinary amounts of extra power and a special low power companion core that can run at full velocity and dynamically call on the other cores as required. The power savings are five times better than less potent counterparts.
The next advancement of mobile speeds is through use of LTE mobile Internet. Even a lot of companies that offer home cable Internet do not supply speeds that can take advantage of Cisco SFP transceiver modules as much as LTE does. Although the speed does not compare yet, LTE is made to evolve over time, and with the promise of future technology, is likely to become a wireless substitute for SFP fiber modules.