What makes your smartphone smart?! TechInfoPost #02

Overview

Today, we live in a global village! one that is so small, that it fits in our hands. The smartphones have changed our perspective towards many things in the world. First of all, It has changed the way we interact, transact, all the way up to handling businesses! 

Furthermore it has also replaced the overpriced professional cameras, GPS systems, entertainment systems and many more, to a certain extent. Thus it is essential for us to know what makes smartphones do, what they do best. In this post,  I’m writing about what factors contribute to make a “smart”phone.

Adding smartness to your phones.. 

     Present day smartphones are no less, compared to a laptop/PC. A typical smartphone in the back end, comprises of: 

—Processor at its core (CPU), a Primary storage device: RAM (Random Access Memory), a Secondry storage device and a whole load of sensors. 

On the other hand; in the front end:

—Smartphones accommodate an interactive display, speakers to output audio, microphones for call/recording and noise cancelling.

—There are other components that work behind the scenes; but, In order for our smartphones to work faster and better, all the above mentioned components must be of good specification and quality.

What range of specifications is desired in a smartphone??

Let us begin by analysing the brain of the phone.

• Processor/CPU: A Central Processing Unit (CPU) hosts a processor which handles all the actions, requests, logical operations, etc. on your device. Companies like MediaTek, Qualcomm, Apple and many more, manufacture processors specifically designed for smartphone capabilities. One thing to be remembered is that, the  processor performance depends on lots of factors such as: number of cores, speed, latency and instructions per cycle(IPC).

--Keeping that in mind, First of all greater number of cores doesn’t actually mean good processing power; the speed of the processor also has to be considered. It all boils down to how many instruction threads can the processor handle per core in one cycle. Unfortunately, the smartphone brands do not specify these IPC specifications; it is found only in the processor manufacturing company details. Thus a processor with decent number cores capable of handling plenty of Instruction threads per core is considered to be good.

• RAM: Also known as Random Access Memory, categorised under the primary storage devices; is the one component which is subjected to highest misconception. The general belief is that higher the capacity of RAM, faster is the phone; But the reality is not quite true.

—A RAM is basically used by processors to read and write data quickly since the same operation would demand more time and power upon a hard drive. Thus having higher capacity RAM enables you to only run multiple applications at the same time without any significant lag thereby allowing you to multitask by keeping applications running in the background which is commonly missunderstood as faster operation.

—On the other hand, coming to the speed aspect being influenced by RAM; overall speed of a device can only be augmented by developing softwares that are optimised to consume less memory and processing power. Thus a device with 4GB RAM, with an optimised OS can perform way better than a device with 8GB RAM with a non-optimised OS.

• Secondary storage devices: A secondary storage device on your smartphones may be removable(memory cards) or external storage(Pen drives). It is responsible for holding permanent data stored by the users. 

—These days smartphone manufacturers have opted to ditch the removable memory slots and implement only internal storage; the main reason behind this is that, the interface between OS/apps and the internal storage works faster in reading and writing data compared to that on an external storage.

• Sensors: Sensors cover a wide bracket of operations starting with the touch sensors on displays to controlling screen brightness based on surrounding illumination. some of the must have sensors on a smartphone are: 

—Accelerometer, Fingerprint sensor, Gyroscope, Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor and a sensor hub(its a micro-controller/processor that integrates data from different sensors to take the load off the main processing unit). I will be writing another post specifically related to sensors; stay tuned for more updates on sensors!

• Interactive Displays: The touch screen phones have witnessed a plethora of display technologies starting from TFT LCDs(Thin Film Transistor technology) to Retina displays and present day’s super AMOLED(Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) displays.

— The advent of LED displays has led to the genesis of new generation displays that are more vibrant, light weight and has extremely thin display layers. Moreover, the LED displays have also cut down the battery consumption leading to better battery life. Therefore, a good display is the one which incorporates atleast any one of the LED technologies.