Tag: Smartphone

What is the fast charge mode？

Mobile phone manufacturers are limited by the size of their mobile phones and their battery capacity is limited, so they began to turn their attention to fast charging. Fast charging is a technology that increases the charging power of mobile phones within a reasonable range and aims to quickly replenish most of the power for mobile phones. The charging power is equal to the current multiplied by the voltage. There are currently two solutions that can increase the charging power, high voltage, small current and low voltage and high current.

For example, the process of charging a mobile phone is like a process of dripping a mineral water bottle with a hole in the bottle. To speed up, first squeeze the water bottle to make the water flow faster, which is the high voltage and small current. The second is to tie another hole. At the same time, the water flow doubles. This is the low voltage and high current.

High voltage and small current

In 2013, Qualcomm introduced the Quick Charge 1.0 standard to increase the charging efficiency by increasing the input current, allowing the handset equipped with the Snapdragon 600 processor to support 5V/2A”/charging. However, due to the limitations of the micro USB interface, the input current should not be too large, so Quick Charge 2.0/3.0 can increase the power by increasing the supply voltage, which can achieve 9V/2A. In 2016, Qualcomm introduced the Quick Charge 4.0 standard, which is said to support the optimal voltage intelligent negotiation algorithm to provide the most suitable charging voltage for the battery. In addition to Qualcomm, MediaTek’s Pump Express Plus 1.0/2.0, Samsung’s Fast Charge, and Meizu’s charge 3.0 also use this high-voltage, low-current solution.

Low voltage and high current

Remember to charge for five minutes and talk for two hours? In 2014, OPPO introduced VOOC flash charging technology with a charging power of 22W. VOOC flash charging is a typical low-voltage and high-current solution, but as mentioned earlier, the micro USB interface will limit the current, so OPPO has customized the charger and charging cable, and even the internal circuit of the mobile phone has been modified to support 5V/4A. At present, OPPO’s dual-cell SuperVOOC super flash charging has a maximum charging power of nearly 50W and can charge 40% in 10 minutes. Also using this solution is Huawei SuperCharge Super Fast Charge, plus DASH Flash Charger.

Most Android phones that support fast charge will be equipped with a fast charge charger. There are exceptions, of course, so don’t ignore the accessories when buying the product. Be sure to look at the voltage and current requirements above.

High-voltage small current and low-voltage high-current are all in order to solve the charging problem, and there are differences due to different solutions to the micro USB problem. But now it is progressing, becoming smarter and safer, and micro USB is now undergoing changes, and mobile phone charging will become more and more perfect in the future. But now, you can turn on the “power saving mode” or choose the right fast charge charger to speed up.

What Do the AI Chips in New Smartphones Actually Do?

Artificial intelligence is coming to your phone. The iPhone X has a Neural Engine as part of its A11 Bionic chip; the Huawei Kiri 970 chip has what’s called a Neural Processing Unit or NPU on it; and the Pixel 2 has a secret AI-powered imaging chip that just got activated. So what exactly are these next-gen chips designed to do?

As mobile chipsets have grown smaller and more sophisticated, they’ve started to take on more jobs and more different kinds of jobs. Case in point, integrated graphics—GPUs now sit alongside CPUs at the heart of high-end smartphones, handling all the heavy lifting for the visuals so the main processor can take a breather or get busy with something else.

The new breed of AI chips are very similar—only this time the designated tasks are recognizing pictures of your pets rather than rendering photo-realistic FPS backgrounds.

What we talk about when we talk about AI

AI, or artificial intelligence, means just that. The scope of the term tends to shift and evolve over time, but broadly speaking it’s anything where a machine can show human-style thought and reasoning.

A person hidden behind a screen operating levers on a mechanical robot is artificial intelligence in the broadest sense—of course today’s AI is way beyond that, but having a programmer code responses into a computer system is just a more advanced version of getting the same end result (a robot that acts like a human).

As for computer science and the smartphones in your pocket, here AI tends to be more narrowly defined. In particular it usually involves machine learning, the ability for a system to learn outside of its original programming, and deep learning, which is a type of machine learning that tries to mimic the human brain with many layers of computation. Those layers are called neural networks, based on the neural networks inside our heads.

So machine learning might be able to spot a spam message in your inbox based on spam it’s seen before, even if the characteristics of the incoming email weren’t originally coded into the filter—it’s learned what spam email is.

Deep learning is very similar, just more advanced and nuanced, and better at certain tasks, especially in computer vision—the “deep” bit means a whole lot more data, more layers, and smarter weighting. The most well-known example is being able to recognize what a dog looks like from a million pictures of dogs.

Plain old machine learning could do the same image recognition task, but it would take longer, need more manual coding, and not be as accurate, especially as the variety of images increased. With the help of today’s superpowered hardware, deep learning (a particular approach to machine learning, remember), is much better at the job.

To put it another way, a machine learning system would have to be told that cats had whiskers to be able to recognize cats. A deep learning system would work out that cats had whiskers on its own.

Bear in mind that an AI expert could write a volume of books on the concepts we’ve just covered in a couple of paragraphs, so we’ve had to simplify it, but those are the basic ideas you need to know.

AI chips on smartphones

As we said at the start, in essence, AI chips are doing exactly what GPU chips do, only for artificial intelligence rather than graphics—offering a separate space where calculations particularly important for machine learning and deep learning can be carried out. As with GPUs and 3D graphics, AI chips give the CPU time to focus on other tasks, and reduces battery draw at the same time. In also means your data is more secure, because less of it has to be sent off to the cloud for processing.

So what does this mean in the real world? It means image recognition and processing could be a lot faster. For instance, Huawei claims that its NPU can perform image recognition on 2,000 pictures every second, which the company also claims is 20 times faster than it would take with a standard CPU.

More specifically, it can perform 1.92 teraflops, or a trillion floating point operations per second, when working with 16-bit floating point numbers. As opposed to integers or whole numbers, floating point numbers—with decimal points—are crucial to the calculations running through the neural networks involved with deep learning.

Apple calls its AI chip, part of the A11 Bionic chip, the Neural Engine. Again, it’s dedicated to machine learning and deep learning tasks—recognizing your face, recognizing your voice, recording animojis, and recognizing what you’re trying to frame in the camera. It can handle some 600 billion operations per second, Apple claims.

App developers can tap into this through Core ML, and easy plug-and-play way of incorporating image recognition and other AI algorithms. Core ML doesn’t require the iPhone X to run, but the Neural Engine handles these types of tasks faster. As with the Huawei chip, the time spend offloading all this data processing to the cloud should be vastly reduced, theoretically improving performance and again lessening the strain on battery life.

And that’s really what these chips are about: Handling the specific types of programming tasks that machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks rely on, on the phone, faster than the CPU or GPU can manage. When Face ID works in a snap, you’ve likely got the Neural Engine to thank.

Is this the future? Will all smartphone inevitably come with dedicated AI chips in future? As the role of artificial intelligence on our handsets grows, the answer is likely yes. Qualcomm chips can already use specific parts of the CPU for specific AI tasks, and separate AI chips is the next step. Right now these chips are only being utilized for a small subsection of tasks, but their importance is going to only grow.

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What Makes a Smartphone Smart?

You probably hear the term “smartphone” tossed around a lot. But if you’ve ever wondered exactly what a smartphone is, well, you’re not alone. How is a smartphone different than a cell phone, and what makes it so smart?

In a nutshell, a smartphone is a device that lets you make telephone calls, but also adds in features that, in the past, you would have found only on a personal digital assistant or a computer–such as the ability to send and receive e-mail and edit Office documents, for example.

So, it’s essentially connected to the internet and offers personalized services as a result. (Some people think that’s so the phone can spy on you.)

But, to really understand what a smartphone is (and is not), and whether you should buy one, we’ll start with a history lesson. In the beginning, there were cell phones and personal digital assistants (or PDAs). Cell phones were used for making calls–and not much else–while PDAs, like the Palm Pilot, were used as personal, portable organizers. A PDA could store your contact info and a to-do list, and could sync with your computer.

Eventually, PDAs gained wireless connectivity and were able to send and receive e-mail. Cell phones, meanwhile, gained messaging capabilities, too. PDAs then added cellular phone features, while cell phones added more PDA-like (and even computer-like) features. The result was the smartphone.

Key Smartphone Features

While there is no standard definition of the term “smartphone” across the industry, we thought it would be helpful to point out what we here at Lifewire.com define as a smartphone, and what we consider a cell phone.

Here are the features we look at:

Operating System

In general, a smartphone will be based on an operating system that allows it to run applications. Apple’s iPhone runs the iOS, and BlackBerry smartphones run the BlackBerry OS. Other devices run Google’s Android OS, HP’s webOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

Apps

While almost all cell phones include some sort of software (even the most basic models these days include an address book or some sort of contact manager, for example), a smartphone will have the ability to do more. It may allow you to create and edit Microsoft Office documents–or at least view the files. It may allow you to download apps, such as personal and business finance managers, handy personal assistants, or, well, almost anything. Or it may allow you to edit photos, get ]driving directions via GPS, and create a playlist of digital tunes.

Web Access

More smartphones can access the Web at higher speeds, thanks to the growth of 4G and 3G data networks, as well as the addition of Wi-Fi support to many handsets. Still, while not all smartphones offer high-speed Web access, they all offer some sort of access. You can use your smartphone to browse your favorite sites.

QWERTY Keyboard

By our definition, a smartphone includes a QWERTY keyboard. This means that the keys are laid out in the same manner they would be on your computer keyboard–not in alphabetical order on top of a numeric keypad, where you have to tap the number 1 to enter an A, B, or C. The keyboard can be hardware (physical keys that you type on) or software (on a touch screen, like you’ll find on the iPhone).

Messaging

All cell phones can send and receive text messages, but what sets a smartphone apart is its handling of e-mail. A smartphone can sync with your personal and, most likely, your professional e-mail account. Some smartphones can support multiple e-mail accounts. Others include access to the popular instant messaging services, like AOL’s AIM and Yahoo! Messenger.

These are just some of the features that make a smartphone smart. The technology surrounding smartphones and cell phones is constantly changing, though. What constitutes a smartphone today may change by next week, next month, or next year.