Six Questions About Your Phone's Battery Answered

Guidance to Phone’s Battery

One of the constant problem faced by smartphone users is the battery life and while the handsets tend to be quite faster and powerful, its batteries tend to last for a shorter time in a day due to heavy usage or even moderate use after a period of time. The lithium-ion battery seemed to be around for over two decades and has not changed since Sony began developing them in 1991. Inspite of great efforts invested in replacing them, these batteries seem to be with in use for several more years. The following guidance could be helpful regarding phone’s battery:

1. Do I need to charge the phone when I get it?

It is not necessary to charge on receiving the phone. Earlier battery types like nickel cadmium had memory effect which meant that the batteries could maintain some capacity depending on how they had been charged and discharged. This would mean that electronic products usually come with advice to charge them completely and keep them plugged in for hours prior to use. But in the case of modern lithium-ion batteries, several people tend to agree that there is no such effect and the batteries seem to be dependable. A smartphone is fine to run out of box without filling in, beforehand.

2. Does battery life get worse over a period of time?

The battery tends to weaken over time. Modern lithium-ion batteries have been designed to withstand a certain amount of cycles, a full drain of the battery and a cycle is equal to a battery fully draining though all this does not have to be from one charge. As per Apple, one could use 75% of the battery’s capacity one day and then recharge it fully overnight. If one uses 25% the next day, one would have discharged a total of 100% and the two days would add up to one charge cycle. The lifetime of batteries measure in cycles seems to vary between various devices, though naturally have between 300 and 500 full cycles prior to reaching 70% of their original capacity. That is equal to a couple of years of usage, but the graph shown from Battery University indicates that capacity tends to begin to drop down quickly.

3. Does leaving the smartphone charging damage the battery?

Generally it does not damage the battery. There have been recommendations that keeping the phone charged overnight or continuously could force the battery to weaken since it tends to receive more power than needed. New battery systems nevertheless knows to reduce this to a trickle and only tops up a battery with the power needed. The exclusion is in very hot situations since heat tends to cause lithium-ion batteries to deteriorate somewhat reducing its performance. Since charging a phone tends to heat up a bit, combining this with the hot temperature could cause the damage. You could keep the phone comparatively cool while charging by placing it out of the sun for instance.

4. Can the phone be charged often or should wait till the phone battery has gone well down before charging it?

New lithium-ion batteries tend to gain nothing by being powered down and long charging cycles tend to be worse than short ones. Incomplete discharges and charges seem to prolong battery life, 50% discharges tend to occur between 1,200 and 1,500 times prior to capacity drops of 70% of its original span when compared to 300 to 500 for 0-100% charges. This efficiently would mean running the phone down 50%, charging it up again and running it down to 50% again would be better than a complete discharge.

5. Does turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth improve the battery life? What about airplane mode?

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not power hungry as they tend to be or as the phone’s cellular radio. Keeping them on would not possibly drain a vast amount of battery, though if one wants to completely maximise efficiency, it could help somewhat. Having the cellular radio look for signal in location where there is no signal, could be draining. You could activate airplane mode if the mobile signal is not needed. If you can connect to Wi-Fi go ahead – using 4G or 3G tends to drain the battery quicker than Wi-Fi.

6. How else can battery be saved?

Various things can be done to decrease how much power the phone could be utilising that will keep your battery lasting for a longer period of time and would deteriorate more slowly which include:

• Turning down the screen brightness 
• Disabling location as well as background app refresh for apps which do not tend to need it 
• Not closing the apps in multitasking – they are idle and opening them later on would tend to use up more battery 
• Disabling push notifications for email, Twitter and Facebook

Google Makes its Machine Learning Platform Available to Developers

Google has taken everyone by surprise when it announced to open its machine learning platform for the developers. It is worth noting that Google has gradually advanced its Cloud Machine learning Platform which was made to be used by the set of apps like Google Photos, Inbox and Translate. This machine learning platform has been detrimental in the popularity of the Google apps as it provided various features to the apps such as speech recognition and reply capabilities in the Inbox app.

At this conference Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has stated that the machine learning in next big thing in the field of technology and opening the door to the developers will help in bringing more powerful features to the end users.

Breakdown of Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Platform

Cloud Machine learning platform principally has two parts wherein one offer an opportunity to the developers for building machine-learning replicas based on their personal records and another brings a pre-trained replica for the developers.

Google will be providing wide range of tools such as Google Cloud Datalab, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage from which data can be harnessed to train the machine learning models.

Once the data has been fed by the developer then all the necessary aspect of creating models will be taken by the Cloud Machine learning on its own. As Google opens its platform, any kind of application will be able to get benefits of the deep learning methods to increase its potential.

On other hand, Google even offers pre-trained models which come loaded with existing API such as Cloud Vision API & Google Translate API. Apart from these two API developers will be able to make use of the coveted Google Cloud Speech API. Google has made it clear that with opening up the cloud platform for the developers it is aiming at bringing the great technologies, which it has developed within, to the developers. This will allow them to embed new features and improve the functionalities of the apps in a more complex manner. It is worth mentioning that Cloud Speech API has been powering its voice search along with speech enabled apps for a really long time which has translated into huge popularity of the apps.

Google isn’t the first to open up its cloud platform

Google is simply following the footsteps of Amazon and Microsoft as both of these companies launched their own cloud based platform namely Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services in 2014 and 2015. Amazon Web Services has become quite popular among the commercial segment due to its great services and products at a competitive price points. Microsoft Azure has also found great success with its cloud platform which brings as much as twenty percent of the revenue. Google is simply bringing an edge over its competitors by opening up the platform for the developer who will actively help in improving the features along with feature rich apps to the consumers.

Microsoft's AI Bot

Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Chat Bot

Microsoft has developed a new artificial intelligence chat bot which tends to claim that it would be smarter the more one talk to it. Tay, the so-called bot has been built by Microsoft Technology and Research together with Bing team for the purpose of conducting research on conversational understanding. The Bing team had developed a related conversational bot, XiaoIce, for Chinese market in 2014.

Microsoft executives had dubbed XiaoIce `Cortana’s little sister’ after the company’s voice-activated Cortana personal assistant software of Redmond, Washington.The real world focus of the bot is to enable researchers to experiment and learn how people tend to talk to each other. Microsoft states that for bot which is available through Twitter as well as messaging platforms Kik and GroupMe, AI has been doing the role of a millennial and emojis have been included in the vocabulary and is clearly aimed at 18-24 years olds.

The bot seems to have little useful function for users though it has the potential of three varied method of communication and its website tay.ai tends to boast that the AI can talk through text, play games like guessing the meaning of a string of emojis and make comments on the photos sent to it.

Tay Designed to Engage & Entertain People

Till the time of writing, the bot had accumulated around 3,500 followers on Twitter but had sent over 14,000 messages, responding to questions, statements as well as general abuse within a matter of few seconds. The about section of Tay’s website stated the `Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online via casual and playful conversation.

Tay tends to work depending on public data and with editorial inputs which have been created by staff and comedian. Microsoft has informed that `public data which has been anonymised is the primary data source of Tay and that data has been modelled, cleaned and filtered by the team creating Tay’. Besides the meme-tastic appeal of the bot, there seems to be a grave side to the research behind the AI. Making machine capable of communicating in a natural and human way is a main challenge for learning procedures.

Effort of Service to Comprehend How Humans Speak

Google too had recently updated its Inbox mail service recommending answers to emails and the smart reply feature offers three probable responses which are recommended by Google’s AI. Similar to Tay, Google informs that the more one uses smart replies, the better they will get. If a user desires to share with Tay, the bot tend to track the user’s nickname, gender, zip code, favourite food as well as the relationship status.

Users could delete their profiles on submission of a request through the Tay.ai contact form. In the field of virtual assistants and chat bots, Facebook’s M is also experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence in completing tasks. Though it has been partly controlled by humans, currently the systems are being condition to book restaurants and respond to some questions. The core of the service is an effort to comprehend how humans tend to speak and the best way to respond to them

The next big thing in phones may not be a phone

Phones – Incremental/Slightly Faster/Bigger/More Storage/Better Resolution

Almost a decade after the iPhone had ruined the mould for mobile phones, many are speculating whether the evolution of the smartphone has come to an end since even Apple tends to treat older, smaller 4-inch screens as something new. Industry experts are of the belief that invention in smartphones seems to be giving away to phone functions popping up as software or services in all kinds of new devices varying from cars to fridges to watches and jewellery instead of remaining with handheld devices.

Analysts as well as product designers state that fresh breakthroughs tend to go against the practical limits of what is there in present smartphone hardware with regards to screen size, network capacity and battery life.

The inventor, Christian Lindholm, of the easy text-messaging keyboards in old Nokia phones which made the best-selling mobile device of all time, stated that `everything in the phone industry now is incremental, slightly faster, slightly bigger, slightly more storage or better resolution.

Financial stakes seem to be high as the futures of Apple, Google and Microsoft, which are the three major listed companies of the world, at the end of last year may tend to turn on who will get the jump on making handset dismissed.

Big Scree Devices/Compact Wearable

Several firms seem to be experimenting on new ways of helping consumers to interact with the wider world through sound, touch and sight. These comprise of voice activated personal assistant devices hanging from smart jewellery necklaces with small embedded microphone or tiny earpieces that tend to get thing done depending on the verbal commands.

The biggest tech companies in the world have made great progress in this area with Google Now, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon.com’s Alexa can now read texts or emails for users, answer practical queries, control phone features and manage basic communication or read a map. Richard Windsor, independent financial analyst, stated that `the way the whole thing is evolving, the device is itself becoming another way to provide access to a user’s digital life.

Lindholm now tends to run KoruLab, developers of ultra-efficient, compact software for running wearable devices and sees smartphone utilities splitting into two groups, namely big screen devices for rich entertainment and compact wearable for additional transaction purposes like maintaining one’s calendar, health or fitness monitoring or paying for products and services.

Mobile Networks – Moving to Connect to Other Devices

The financial analysts at UBS have assessed that smartphone makers would be generating over $323 billion by way of revenue this year, which is a 1.4% dropfrom last year. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple exclusively had taken in half of the revenue and more than three quarters of all profits.

Apple had announced a variety of new products recently including cheaper 4-inch screen iPhone SE with a view to reverse the decline iPhone sales. Though phones are presently the Swiss Army knives of the electronic age, their necessary appeal to consumers has moved from eye-catching shiny screens and sleek bevelled edges to the apps and services running on the phones, often as Internet based services hosted in the cloud.

Bob O’Donnell, consumer electronics analyst and president of Technalysis Research in Foster City, California had commented that `mobile networks are moving to connect to all the other devices’.

HTC One M10 is Coming April 12

HTC’s Flagship Smartphone – HTC 10

HTC has begun sending media invitation for an event to be held on April 12 wherein the company is widely expected to expose its next flagship smartphone which is believed to be known as HTC 10. The announcement of the Taiwanese company informed that it would have simultaneous events in New York, London as well as Taipei.

The invitation moreover confirms that the launch event would be live streamed on April 12, on the company’s website. The company has requested users to log on to its website on April 12, 8 am New York Times, 1 pm London time and 8 pm Taipei time.The website also mentions that they admit it, they are obsessed … but in a good way’ and tends to have a hastag `#powerof10’.

The company will be unveiling the `power of 10 and in this case, 10 will be playing into the phone’s name which follows 2015’s HTC One M9 and M8 as well as the original HTC One. The announcement tends to come about a month late this year if one has been following the pattern of HTC for unveiling its headliner phone at the Mobile World Congress show in late February.

New Phone with Home Button/Edges

This delay to the phone watchers has been a sign of the struggle of HTC in stopping the bleed after years of steep market share drop-off together with poor sales. Some of the details of the HTC 10 revealed with a render published earlier in the month portrayed a new phone with a home button together with big edges.

The HTC 10 is said to have a 5.15-inch display together with Snapdragon 820 processor and would sit among the top-tier of Android phone. But the question propped up to HTC is what will make the 10 stand out from home runs like the Galaxy S7 Edge.

HTC has mentioned that it would be introducing its phone at the time of the online event and there would not be an in person component, though it may sound like anyone who would be interested, will be capable of tuning in. The announcement would be streamed at 8 am ET on their website. Besides a 5.15-inch Super LCD 5 display with QHD resolution, the handset would also be packed with a 3000mAh battery which if true would be the largest battery in HTC’s flagship in the HTC phones till date.

Smartphone – Compelling Camera Experience

Some other specifications rumoured regarding the HTC 10 state an Adreno 530 GPU, 4GB of RAM, a 12 megapixel rear camera and a USB Type-C port besides a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. Some of the images leaked regarding the unannounced handset recommend that it would sport metal build with broad chamfered edges and a physical home button below the display together with two capacitive buttons.

In an attempt to develop around its forthcoming flagship, HTC has claimed that HTC 10 will sport `World First, World Class’ front and back cameras. Chialin Chang, HTC CFO, had stated that the smartphone is expected to have a very compelling camera experience. According to the rumours, the HTC 10 is said to come in four colours of black and white, white, gold and black.