FEATURES OF SMARTPHONES

Name: Ganesh.V

Roll no: 13L217

FEATURES OF TODAYS SMARTPHONES

A smartphone is a handheld device, basically a mobile phone with a mobile operating

system. The smartphone combines the features of a regular cellphone and a personal digital

assistant (PDA).

Some popular operating systems are listed below.

Android, an open source platform mostly developed by Google. iOS, developed Apple Corporation. Windows OS, developed by Microsoft. Blackberry. Firefox OS. Symbian OS, developed by Nokia.

Symbian phones were the first devices to be marketed as a smartphone. It combined the

features of a mobile phone and a PDA.

Applications (APPS)

Applications, more popularly known as Apps are software applications that enhance the

performance of the operating system. They are also used to access other options in the

smartphone. Some of the apps in smartphones:

Calendar Calculator Web browser Call manager Camera Media player.

These apps come preloaded in every smartphone. Entertainment and business apps are more

popular among smartphone users, and are basically free apps. They are available in the appstore

of every OS, like the Google play store and Apples app store.

Android apps can be easily developed and distributed in the open source community. Google

chrome is a popular web browser suited for all smartphones.

Apps are common to all smartphone producing companies. Apart from that, each company

gives its smartphones new features that gives an edge over other devices in the smartphone

market.

Storage

Smartphones come with inbuilt and expandable memory options of the order of Giga bytes.

SanDisk micro SD cards are suitable for most smartphones and house upto 64 GB memory, enough to

store millions of apps, documents and business information.

Figure 1.Microsoft one drive and google drive

Storage is not only physical; cloud storage is also gaining popularity. Notable cloud

storages are the Google Drive and Microsofts OneDrive.

Processors

The brain of the smartphone is the microprocessor chip inside it, and todays smartphone

microprocessors perform operations at supersonic speeds. They include the CPU and the GPU.

Parallel processing is also possible with the introduction of multicore processors, notably the

dual and quad core processors. Some are listed below:

1. Nvidia Tegra Tegra chips are best known for their graphics capabilities giving a

smooth gaming experience. They also have a decent battery life.

2. Qualcomm Snapdragon similar to ARM architecture. HD videos play without any

glitches under these processors.

3. Samsung Exynos Samsungs own version of processors, built exclusively for

multitasking capabilities.

4. Intels Atom processor.

The greater the size of the RAM, faster is the access speed of applications in a smartphone.

The following sections discuss the specifications of Samsung Galaxy series smartphones

Samsung galaxy core : GT I8262.

It succeeded the Samsung Galaxy S Duos version, with a larger LCD display, better camera

resolution and improved RAM size.

The device was released in the market on June 2013.

Physical features

Dimensions

The device weighs 124 grams, lighter than many introduced smartphones. The LCD screen is approximately 60% of the front body about 4.3 inches in size. The front panel houses buttons, sensors and the camera. The back panel is a plastic cover for protecting the battery, the sim card and the microSD

slot.

It has apertures for the speaker, led flashlight and the primary camera. The front facing camera is intended for video streaming (3G video streaming).

Figure 2. Front and back panels

Display and touch features

The device has a TFT (Thin film Transistor) 4. 3inch LCD display, integrated with a

capacitive touchscreen. The resolution of the screen is 480x800 pixels.

The screen responds mostly to finger touches; it sometimes responds to the touch of

paper and transparent plastic, though its response is not much pronounced. Some of the touch

gestures are listed below.

Double touch (multi touch) and dragging for selecting and dragging apps across the

screen. A double tap can zoom in on an image or a web page or a map.

Flick and Pinch - Pinching on a screen part to zoom in or out. Flicking shifts to the next

page of a pdf reader or an application page or the next Tab in a chrome browser.

Motion controls

Samsung galaxy core support simple motions to allow easy control.

Screen rotation allows to switch between portrait and landscape viewing modes. This

option is enabled in the notification panel.

Picking up and turning over the device Device vibrates for missed calls and new

messages when it has been idle for some time. Turning the device mutes incoming calls,

pauses media and FM radio.

Shaking the device starts Bluetooth device search and computers via Samsung Kies for

other applications (like ShareIt).

Operating system

Samsung galaxy core comes preloaded with Android 4.1.2 Jellybean release. The first

device released was not capable of an OS update. Subsequent releases came with the next OS

version update (Android Kitkat).

Chipset - CPU and the GPU

The devices houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 system on Chip. It is based on CMOS

semiconductor technology. The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8225 has an average performing

CPU with a maximum clock speed of 1,000.00 MHz It has 2 cores, resulting in good multi-

tasking when compared to a single core processor.

This processor is based on the Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) design

strategy enabling instructions to execute faster, as opposed to the Complex Instruction Set

Computing (CISC) design strategy, which is generally slower at executing due to lengthy

instructions.

CPU specifications

Primary CPU : ARM cortex A5

CPU clock speed : 1.0 GHz

Cores : 2

Word length : 32 bit

Data bus : 32 bit

Graphics Processing Unit Qualcomm Adreno

The Qualcomm Adreno 203 is a separate graphics processor solely intended for the

accelerated creation of images to be outputted to a display. Its entire architecture is structured

around processing large blocks of data in parallel.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8225 has a specialized digital signal microprocessor

that is used for the low-power operation of a device in applications that deal with analog signals

such as audio, video, and mobile broadband signals. Each analog signal is converted into a

digital signal that is then processed by the DSP. This improves performance.

Voice recognition Samsung S voice

S voice is an app that comes with the device and recognizes the users voice to carry out

basic commands like placing a call, taking a picture, setting an alarm, doing a web search. There

are many variants of this app, and they were improved to a greater extent in the Galaxy S series.

To use the app, the device should be connected to an internet network.

Memory

The device has an internal memory of 8 GB, of which 4.5 GB is available to the user. An

external micro SD card slot is also available, which is extendable to 64 GB. Internal RAM is

1GB for this device.

Camera

Primary camera : 5 mega pixels (2592 x 1944), with autofocus , touch focus and LED flash.

Video : 480 pixels( 30 frames per second)

Secondary (front) camera : 0.3 MP

Figure 3. S voice can accept voice commands

Communication

The device supports 2G and 3G sim cards.

WLAN : Wi-Fi, hotspot

Bluetooth : Bluetooth 3.0

GPS : Assisted GPS (A-GPS), provides position of mobile in a shorter time, compared to

a standalone GPS module.

Radio : FM radio

USB : microUSB v2.0, but does not have On the Go(OTG) support.

Battery

The smartphone is powered by Lithium ion battery with a capacity of 1800 mAh. It has a

talk time of 14 hours for 2G and 9 hours for 3G.

Battery life can be extended by using the smart stay feature, which turns off the display

when the user is not looking at the screen. The option uses the front camera to assess the users

face and turn off the display screen. This conserves battery life to some extent.

Figure 4. Smart stay feature.

Sensors

The devices houses various sensors as listed below:

Accelerometer.

Proximity.

Magnetometer (digital compass).

Accelerometer

An accelerometer is a sensor which measures the tilting motion and orientation of a mobile

phone. The Apple iPhone was the first popular mobile phone to make the accelerometer a key

feature of its user interface.

The accelerometer is used to ensure photographs are presented in the correct way - portrait or

landscape - depending on the way the phone is held.

Accelerometers are also increasingly used as a means of user input, most noticeably in games

where tilting and rotating the handset can control onscreen action.

Proximity sensor

The proximity sensor senses the nearness of the user with the help of ambient light sensors. The

sensor can be used to turn off the screen when he places it near his ears for placing calls. By this

way, battery can be conserved.

Testing

The Samsung device has an inbuilt test menu for testing the features of the device, such as the

sensors, the camera and the LCD.

To access this, the dialer is opened and the code *#0*# is dialed. A screen as in the next page

opens automatically.

Figure 5.Test menu in the device

Each option runs a simulation to test the specific part of the device. For e.g., choosing the

Mega cam option opens the back camera to take a picture and test the quality.

Choosing the sensor opens another screen, containing the three sensors listed above. They

give the raw data values obtained from the sensors.

The magnetometer is found to always point to the geographical north pole ( indicated by

the blue line on the digital compass).

Choosing the graph option under the accelerometer gives a graph of the instantaneous g

values obtained from the accelerometer.

Figure 6.Accelerometer graph of raw values

Testing the touchscreen

The touch menu opens a screen as shown below. By dragging curved lines across the

boxes in the screen the accuracy of the touch can be decided.

Figure 7. Touch test option