Hey, I bet you’re so used to a smartphone in your hand that you’ve never even asked
yourself a question: why in the world is it rectangular? Why not square or round, for
example? Or why, for that matter, you can’t use it when in gloves? Yeah that bugs me.
Well, let’s find out, shall we?!
Ever tried using your phone on a sunny day? Yeah, even turning the screen brightness up
to the max isn’t gonna work. Why can’t they do something about it? LCD screens, in
fact, sacrifice visibility for better color reproduction. There are screens that show
a clear picture even in direct sunlight, but the color quality in those is much worse.
They are mostly used in GPS navigators and watches because you need to see the objects
on them, while phone manufacturers keep in mind that you could watch movies and play
games on their products. Try doing that under the glaring sun, though.
It's not recommended to use your smartphone while it’s charging, but for some reason
it’s the opposite for laptops. That reason is heat generation: smartphones are small,
so all the heat they accumulate goes to the battery, damaging it over time. While charging,
your phone heats up, so using it might shorten its life. In laptops, the battery is well
isolated from the rest of the parts, and the heat goes around it. And keeping the charge
of the battery up prolongs its service time, so feel free to plug it in and work all you
like. Isn’t it a bit unfair that electric cars
can be fully charged within an hour, but a much smaller smartphone battery needs at least
the same time or even more? Electric cars have large batteries with separate cooling
systems that don’t allow them to overheat while charging. Smartphones will need equally
good cooling not to melt down if charged too fast. And that adds a lot of extra weight.
And on the topic of charging… If you charge your smartphone in the cold,
you may notice it goes up slower than usual. This happens because charging involves chemical
reactions. They need a certain range of temperatures for optimal work, so if it’s too cold or
too hot, your phone will charge more slowly. Its overall performance will be reduced too,
so better keep it in neutral conditions. You probably know that blue light from screens
of smartphones and computers can mess with your sleep. In modern gadgets, though, there’s
an option called “eye-saver mode” or “eye comfort.” It cuts off part of the blue light,
making the screen yellowish, but letting your eyes and brain rest. It’s especially useful
if you work with documents, since you don’t need a full color palette. It’s best to
turn it off only to watch videos or play games to enjoy the juicy picture, and keep it turned
on the rest of the time. The expression “ is the
new black” suits smartphones and other gadgets like nothing else. Even when there are other
color options, black is almost always one of them. The reason boils down to black being
a universal color that fits any surroundings. You might sit in an orange-toned room, dressed
in green and blue, but your black smartphone or black TV will still look okay. Same goes
for white and grey — all these three colors go well with any other.
Now look at an average smartphone and an equally average tablet PC. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Done? okay. The latter has a bigger size and better computing power, but it’s still cheaper
than the smartphone we have here. That’s because the phone has a radio chip and the
tablet does not. Radio chip is probably the most complex part of a smartphone: it has
to be able to work with dozens of different frequencies across the globe and have a huge
range for you to easily talk to anyone in the world. Tablets, on the other hand, don’t
need a radio chip — they have a Wi-Fi one that works with just two standard global frequency
ranges and covers a few hundred feet. Hence the difference in cost.
In winter, it’s annoying that you have to take off your gloves first and only then answer
if someone’s calling you. Or you can use your nose instead. The screen reacts to conductive
materials, and only if they’re a little squishy — they can activate several sensors
at once this way. Gloves don’t conduct electricity, so you either need to use your bare fingers
or buy yourself a pair of gloves with special fingertips. They’re tipped with some rubber
and conductive powder to imitate fingers. When something’s wrong with your device
and you contact tech support, the first question they’d ask is “Did you try turning it
off and back on?” Seems weird, but it actually works. Whatever process is running on your
gadget, it leaves a trace even when you close it. The more processes you run and then close,
the more such traces are left in the memory of your device. And at some point, it might
stop working properly. Rebooting your device helps clear all the unneeded residue and optimize
its work. Better yet, reboot once a week to avoid this trouble altogether.
Now take a good look at your smartphone. It might never have occurred to you, but its
rectangular shape is no accident. And it’s actually what you want it to be. Rectangle
is the most convenient shape for a screen. It has an orientation, so you can flip your
phone all you want and it will adapt. Imagine that with, say, a round-shaped display — you’d
have to always turn it in your hands until the top is where it belongs. Ugh. Next, it
fits into your pocket nice and cozy: the pocket is deeper than it is wide, so a phone longer
than it is broad will sit there perfectly. A square or circular phone will be more of
an inconvenience. Then again, a rectangle is much easier to handle. It fits in your
palm, and it feels better than a circle or a square. And finally, we’re used to having
rectangular things all around us: pictures, sheets of paper, books, photographs. Having
round-shaped screens would’ve been just… weird. Still, there have been attempts to
create circular and square smartphones, but as you can guess, they didn’t get on.
Ever tried taking a photo of that striking moon on your smartphone? If you have, you
know what disappointment is. Yes, that little blurry whitish spot is the same beautiful
celestial body you see in the night sky. Your smartphone camera is just not light-sensitive
enough to capture it in its full glory. Manufacturers trade extra-high quality of photographs for
easiness of use, given that the average smartphone user doesn’t even need professional pictures.
So if you want a breathtaking shot of the starry skies, better get yourself a DSLR camera
with a special lens. Most smartphones now have both rear and front-facing
cameras, but they differ in picture quality a lot. This is because a higher quality camera
requires more space inside the phone, and manufacturers choose to install a smaller
and cheaper camera in the front of their devices to save that space. Instead, they up the performance
of the smartphone itself, which is a good trade-off, if you ask me. After all, the front
camera is mostly used for selfies, and it’s not like you’re gonna print them on a poster.
When you turn your phone or computer off and then on again, the booting process can seem
awfully slow. Why can’t it just start up immediately, right? Well, when you switch
off your device, it dumps everything from its short-term memory. Think of it as hitting
your gadget hard on the head: it forgets everything you did with it and has to remember it again
upon boot-up. So it takes time for the device to wake up and start functioning at its normal
speed. Many modern smartphones have had their headphone
jacks removed. There are two reasons for this: first, without a 3.5 mm jack at the top or
bottom of the phone, you can make the device itself much thinner because it’s now by
far the thickest part of any phone. And second, water resistance is trending today, and a
headphone jack is a gaping hole in the body of a smartphone. Naturally, water can get
in there easily, so getting rid of the jack allows for making the phone waterproof.
Taking photos in the dark with a flash, you must’ve noticed your smartphone flashes
several times before making the actual shot. Remember those horrid red eyes in old photographs
made on film or digital cameras? That happened exactly because the camera flashed only once.
In the dark, the pupils of your eyes become larger, trying to catch more light to see
better. And when they reflect the camera’s flash, the red-eye effect appears. With smartphones,
the first short flash makes the pupils contract from bright light, and only then the device
takes a shot — and you don’t resemble a horror movie creature anymore. At least
your eyes don’t. Hey I’m kidding.
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