Smartphones

While smartphone sales have been stagnant for several years, Gartner has never reported a year-on-year decline since it began tracking them in 2004—until now. The analyst firm reports that total global handset sales stood at around 408 million units in Q4 2017, a YoY decline of 5.6 percent. While Samsung remained on top of the list with just over 74 million units sold, it saw a fall of 3.6 percent compared to Q4 2016. Apple, meanwhile, saw its iPhone sales drop 5 percent from 77 million to 73 million. Out of the top five, only Chinese giants Huawei (7.6 percent) and Xiaomi (79 percent) recorded yearly increases. Gartner blames two factors on the decrease: The lack of quality “ultra-low-cost” smartphones has meant a slowing of upgrades from feature phones to smartphones; and phone owners buying replacement flagship models are keeping them for much longer. While Samsung’s sales are falling, Gartner believes the Galaxy S9 handsets, which are set to be unveiled at … [Read more...] about Gartner says smartphone sales declined for the first time ever in Q4

Engineers at the University of Washington have demonstrated the ability to charge a smartphone wireless from across a room using a laser. It’s far from a production-ready solution, mind you, but it could potentially steer the industry in the direction of true, contactless wireless charging. The system, outlined in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable & Ubiquitous Technologies, utilizes a laser emitter configured to produce a focused beam in the near-infrared spectrum that’s capable of delivering a steady 2W of power from a distance of up to 4.3 meters, or around 14 feet, to a smartphone equipped with a power cell on its back. The beam’s radius at that distance is around 15 square inches although it can be modified to cover an area of up to 3.25 feet at a distance of nearly 40 feet. Safety was the team’s primary focus, said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor at the … [Read more...] about Prototype laser system can charge a smartphone from across the room

Smartphone manufacturers have been trying to reduce the size of their devices since they first hit the market. Indeed, some have speculated Apple's "courageous" decision to remove the headphone jack from their phones was partially a result of this trend. Now, chip designer ARM may have found a way to push the envelope even further. According to The Verge, the company has designed a new component called an "iSIM" that aims to pack SIM cards into the same chip as the processor. The component reportedly takes up a mere "fraction of a millimeter squared" compared to current SIM cards which tend to be about 12.3mm x 8.8mm in overall size. Naturally, as devices have gotten smaller over time, packing increasingly powerful hardware inside them has become a pretty difficult task. As such, innovations such as this could prove to be nearly essential for the future health of the industry. The space the iSIM would free up could allow for larger batteries, even thinner phones, additional RAM … [Read more...] about New ‘iSIM’ technology could combine your smartphone’s processor and SIM card into one component