Smart Phones

The phone in our pocket is a computer

Another device that's become a very powerful computer over the years has been the phone in our pocket. This smartphone is a computer, and so we can use this for a lot of the same things that we use a regular computer for.

Historically our phone systems have developed at a much different rate, with different technology, than our compute power has, and so those two have been two separate systems. But more recently it's made more and more sense to combine those two systems, and one of the ways that we've done that is with our smartphones.

The smartphone takes the concept of cellular, and how cellular works, and merges that into how a tablet works. So now we have essentially a tablet, a smaller tablet, inside our pocket that's capable of making phone calls. So these smartphones are really just phones that have many different capabilities and a lot of processing power to them.

Vendors, operating systems and apps

So what are some of the vendors that do this? Apple has their iPhone, there's the Samsung Galaxy. The main purpose of this is communication and connection, but we do a lot of entertainment on it, and there are some apps that we can do, like work functionality, so there's some productivity that we can also use this for as well.

For OS examples, the iPhone uses iOS, the Samsung Galaxy uses Android. Those are the operating systems that you might find out there, and there are others as well.

Then there are a lot of different apps for these. There are not as many apps as you would see for a tablet, because a tablet could play anything that an iPhone could play, because they're very similar technologies and it's got the screen space for it all, so it can adapt any app to play on a tablet. However, there are a lot of apps that won't be on a phone because you just don't have the screen space for it; you don't have as big of a screen.

Benefits and drawbacks

So what are the benefits of a smartphone? You can make phone calls with it, obviously. The portability of it, a lot of connectivity, and ease of use. It's really handy when I need to pull up a map to get somewhere; then I can pull up a map to get directions to it.

Now the drawbacks. These devices can be distractions. There can be health issues with this because we get addiction; there's some addiction that can happen. There's bullying, there's sleep deprivation. So what we're finding with this connectivity that we have in our pocket is that there are some drawbacks to it that are not necessarily technical drawbacks, but actually more of just our own health and well-being. So we have to find balance in our lives.

But smartphones are so handy to have that they're not going to go away anytime soon, despite having some of these drawbacks, just because there are so many benefits to having a smartphone.

Inside a smartphone

Here's an example of a smartphone that we're going to crack open and take a look at the inside of, and this is an old iPhone that I have here. What we see here is, first of all, this screen right here is the touch screen. It pops off and we can see the connections to the rest of the board. So what I'm going to do is take a screwdriver here and pop the connections off. These connections are a lot of little pins here that need to interconnect that screen to the rest of it, so I'm going to pop those off to take a look at the rest of this.

One of the first things we see here is the memory. This is a memory chip right here. With iPhones, you buy it with whatever memory it's going to have, so I think this one is 512, and you buy it with whatever it's going to have and then you're stuck with that. You can't upgrade this.

Another thing we see on here is this taptic engine. This is the piece of equipment right here that gives a tactile feel when you click a button. So when I press something on the screen here, what it'll do is make it feel like it makes a little click sound, so it makes it feel more like an actual button even though it's just software. It gives a little vibration to the phone to give that sensation.

We also see the battery here. This kind of longer L-shaped piece of equipment, that's the battery right there. We see a couple of cameras in here, and then a lot of this stuff is covered up, so let's get a little bit further involved and take some of this apart.

It looks like I just took out the three cameras, so there's the three cameras there, and just took out that component there. So this is the motherboard of this phone, and it's actually two different layers. At this point in time, if I want to get in there, I would need to heat up the solder and split the board. The processor is inside of that. But the components essentially of this are the same as a regular computer.