I think you’ll agree with me that smartphones are sneaky beasts. They live a secretive life
full of things you might not know… For example, they have a radio built into them that — gasp!
— can’t be turned on! Hey, I’ve got a smartphone that likes to play hide and seek
with me. I never find it where I put it down -- or where I thought I put it down. Anyway,
let’s take a sneak peek at what is known about this mysterious creature…
1. Why smartphones are so big? Ever since they appeared in 2007, no-keyboard
smartphones have been growing steadily bigger. Currently, the largest smartphone doesn’t
even fit into your palm properly, spanning 7.3 inches — that, and it’s also folding,
bringing back memories of old flip phones. These giants of mobile world are called phablets
— a mix of phones and tablets. The reason for this growth is that smartphones are becoming
our primary computing devices, pushing aside PCs and laptops. The mobile Internet connection
is getting faster, picture quality is getting better, so now we can do all the stuff we
need on our phones. And that calls for bigger screens that would allow to work with text
more easily, edit images and videos, and much more.
2. Can you get a shock using a charging smartphone? While charging, your phone is connected to
the grid, so naturally you’d be concerned about a chance of getting electrocuted. Don’t
fret, though: unless you’re using a counterfeit charging device, you’re 100% safe. The charger
transforms the AC, or alternate current, in the grid to direct current, or DC, which is
much weaker and can’t cause any serious damage. But if there’s some problem with
the charger’s insulation, the AC might get into the DC part of the circuit, so when you
touch it, you might receive a hefty shock. So it’s best to only use original chargers.
3. Why does the quality of sound differ so much in headphones and in the smartphone’s
speaker? It’s all the matter of size and distance.
Sound is made by air molecules bumping into each other and going in waves from the source
to your ears. The bigger the source, the stronger it affects the air, and so the louder and
clearer the sound. That’s why the tiny speaker in your phone will never rival those huge
boxes they use at concerts, or even the speaker in your TV or laptop.
Headphones, on the other hand, are small but still manage to provide amazing sound. That’s
because they produce it right into your ears, without the need to cover long distance between
your eardrums and the membrane. And that’s why, when someone listens to music in their
headphones with poor isolation, you can only hear that annoying scraping.
4. What is planned obsolescence? It’s no secret that electronic devices are
manufactured with an expiry date in mind. But it’s not evil corporations deliberately
making them last a very short time so that you buy new ones every year. Every part of
a gadget has its own service time, and it makes sense to take the part with the shortest
life expectancy as a standard. In a smartphone, that’s normally the battery. It has a limited
number of recharge cycles, after which it stops working. As more and more phones are
made with non-removable battery, you can’t simply replace it, so manufacturers make all
other parts of the phone match the battery’s lifetime. Speaking of which…
5. Why are there non-removable batteries at all?
Technically, there still are, but they’re swiftly becoming history. First of all, the
conventional rectangular battery made the phone bulky and, let’s face it, quite unappealing.
The larger the battery, the more juice it has, so this design was necessary for the
phone to work long hours. Secondly, the back lid had to be made of plastic for easier removal,
and it didn’t fit the new trend for metal and glass. Some manufacturers solved the problem,
but that wasn’t all yet. Yet another issue was that an extra layer
of protection for the removable battery required additional space, and that’s a luxury, given
the miniature size of a phone. With a built-in battery, this space could be used for cool
additional features, like wireless charging, for example. And finally, the rectangle shape
was only needed for easy removal. Modern batteries can use any shape instead, and sometimes they
look quite weird. Step design or L-shape are just a few examples of that.
6. How can a smartphone not overheat without a cooling device?
PCs and laptops all have extra coolers to keep them, well, cool. Smartphones, on the
other hand, can operate without any additional fans. Their insides are built so that they
can withstand a certain range of temperatures. If your phone doesn’t get into the environment
that’s either too cold or too hot, it should be okay even if you use it to its full potential.
The phone casing is also a kind of a natural coolant that absorbs heat from the inside
and lets it go to the outside. And finally, the smartphone parts that generate heat do
it in much less copious amounts than a laptop would. Normally, it just wouldn’t be enough
to overheat a phone. But you still can, if you try hard enough! I’d strongly recommend
not doing that, though. 7. How can a compass work inside a phone if
there’s a magnet in it too? As you probably know, the speaker needs a
magnet to work, and that should throw the compass off balance. But it doesn’t happen
because the phone’s compass is adjusted to ignore everything that’s built inside
the phone. Manufacturers warn, though, that any external magnetic force can still make
it go crazy, so if you bring another magnet close to the phone, its compass will show
a wrong direction. The same can happen if you walk through the security metal detector
or put your phone close to an MRI machine (which is also ill-advised).
8. Why don’t smartphones have built-in FM radio?
Actually, they do. Every smartphone there is on the market has a built-in radio chip
that can tune in to AM and FM radio, but the catch is that it’s locked and can’t be
unlocked without the service provider’s and manufacturer’s say-so. There’s much
debate about this, and in earlier smartphones the chip was unlocked by default, so you could
listen to radio (and still can, if you buy such a phone) as much as you wanted. Today,
providers argue that consumers don’t need or want the radio on their phones — they
prefer to stream podcasts and newsfeeds from the Internet instead. Well, what do you do
to listen to music and news? Radio or the web? Let me know down in the comments!
9. How do smartphones know how much charge they have left?
A smartphone battery has a certain voltage range that is tested at the production stage.
During these tests, engineers detect the voltage at the battery’s maximum capacity and check
it all the way down to zero. Then they convert these numbers into percentage and program
the phone to show it on its screen. This way, the phone will know that, for example, 4.3
Volts correspond to 100%, while 2.7 Volts are 1%. By the way, the older the battery,
the sharper its charge drops to zero. If you’ve ever seen your phone turning off while still
at 4%, now you know why. 10. How come smartphones acquire a GPS signal
much faster than dedicated GPS equipment? If you have a car with a GPS navigator, you
probably know how long it takes to connect to the satellites and give you your location.
If you turn on GPS on your smartphone, though, it’ll only take a few seconds to adjust
and show you where you are. It happens because a smartphone can use different networks to
help it locate itself, such as cellular or wireless networks. Dedicated GPS equipment,
on the other hand, can only rely on satellites. So if, for some reason, all the cellular and
Wi-Fi networks suddenly shut down, your phone will take as much time to connect to GPS as
your car. And a little bonus: Why do browser pages sometimes
load in a weird way, only to correct themselves in a few moments?
We’ve all seen it: you load a page on your smartphone or PC, it first appears very strange
and basic, like it would look, perhaps, in the 1990s, and then it kinda reloads and finally
appears as it should. It’s called a flash of unstyled content, or FOUC. This happens
especially when you visit the website for the first time, so it doesn’t yet have cookies
to help you load it faster. The flash is the content of the website seen in your browser’s
default styles. It appears because the browser hasn’t managed to load the stylesheet of
the website in time, but it still hurries to deliver. Let’s thank it for that, I guess.
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