Electronics Archives

Google's Modular Smart Phone

Today was a rough day. From about midnight last night until about 5 this afternoon, I was without a phone. No texts, no calls, no browsing, and most painfully, no games at all. It was awful. However, one of the good things about my particular phone is that my problem was a relatively easy, inexpensive fix for my problem. I paid a company $50 and they came out, got my phone, repaired it, and brought it to me. (I can’t recommend Phone Falcon enough for folks in the Louisville area.) The only thing that stopped me from replacing the part myself is the fact that my phone case is impossible to open without specialty tools. That might be changing.

Google has been working for years on Project Ara, a pie-in-the-sky idea for a modular smartphone. Meaning, if you want a better camera, you buy it and put it on your phone. If you want different speakers or a different screen, or a new battery, you simply pop off the old part and replace it with the module you purchased. The smartphone frame itself is the central piece, but it can be augmented in any number of cool ways. Even better, it’s being moved from Google’s skunkworks to actual production!

“It will be thin, it will be light, it will be beautiful, and we’ll launch it next year,” said Google’s Richard Woolridge at the company’s yearly IO developers’ conference.

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iPhone 7 May Not Have Smart Connector

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

The Smart Connector, in theory, is a good idea. It’s a combination data port, power cable, and connector for devices that does pretty much everything you’d want a port to do, albeit all at the same time. It’s one of the key parts of Apple’s new line of iPad Pro. However, it may not hit everything in the upcoming generation of consumer electronics and gadgets. Apple may not be putting its new Smart Connector on the iPhone 7.

Why wouldn’t Apple put it on the iPhone 7? Well, it could be an issue of space. It could be an issue with battery position. It could be an issue with Apple’s other plan to get rid of the 3.5mm headphone jack for some sort of Lightning audio port. Maybe they just want to hold off until they roll out the iPhone 8. Maybe it’ll make the cut after all.

Either way, Apple is looking to shake things up. Last quarter was the first quarter where Apple’s iPhone sales dropped, and Apple reported its first revenue decline in 13 years.

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Your Next Smartphone's Most-Wanted Features

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

smartphone-battery

There’s no such thing as a perfect smartphone. They’re great devices, but there are a lot of problems with them. Well, not problems, just… ways to find improvements. After all, there’s no a device in the house that can’t be improved with a little consideration. Here are some of the features your next smartphone SHOULD have.

Some of these features, like smart charging and fingerprint reading, are already there, but not very common. Other features, like expandable storage and removable batteries, are features that SHOULD happen and were available on older phones, but have been phased out over time in a drive to make things smaller and lighter. However, smaller and lighter aren’t always the be-all end-all of phones anymore.

I’m having issues with my phone battery now, so it won’t be too long before I’ll want to actually pull the battery out and swap it with a better one. I don’t think I can do that on my current phone, but I’d like to find a way.

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The Online Museum Of Malware

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

These days, there are viruses and malware everywhere. Every website you visit might have it. Forget about downloading anything; you’re just asking for trouble. Even our phones and watches can fall victim to virii and nefarious things. Once upon a time, viruses weren’t really all that bad. It was more about having fun and less about destruction or ransomware, and a new museum has opened up to remember the good old days of relatively harmless viruses. You won’t need to hop on a bus; it’s all on your computer. The Malware Museum is an online museum dedicated to malware and old-school viruses.

The software examples have been put together by security researcher Mikko Hyppönen. Don’t worry; they all run safely in your browser via DOSBox and won’t do any harm. You can even download the old viruses and play with them yourself; once again, there’s nothing to fear because all the harmful code has been stripped away from them, so they’re just there to have fun with. If panicking over viruses is fun.

Find out all about the old-school viruses by heading over to the Malware Museum on the Internet Archive.

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Peak iPhone

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

There’s always a time when a technology stops being the hot new thing and becomes just something most people have in their house. For example, the television. For awhile, HD TVs were big business, and now most people have them. Sure, they can make them bigger or give them better, higher definition, but at a certain point a TV is just a thing you watch The Bachelor on. There’s not a must-have new TV on the market. For Apple, there’s a very real fear that the company is struggling with: Has Apple reached ‘peak iPhone’?

Here’s the issue. The first quarter of 2016 showed a huge decline in iPhone sales from 2015’s first quarter, which for Apple isn’t necessarily a good thing. After all, there’s an enormous user base, and most of them rush out to upgrade phones whenever they can to get the latest and greatest. What that means is they might do great business when the next iPhone comes out, but for the moment, they have a huge business that depends on selling iPhones to people, with the iPhone accounting for two-thirds of $234 billion dollars in revenues.

That’s a mighty big bite of the apple if that number starts going down. Still, I think a lot of companies would kill to be in Apple’s position. If they need a revenue boost, they just need to push out a slight upgrade on the iPhone, or some sort of new color scheme.

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Google Maps Will Start Predicting Your Journey

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

Google Maps is really handy. I’m generally okay at knowing my way around, getting to places where I need to go, and not forgetting directions, but that’s because I write everything down. I used to have notebooks full of directions of places I would go multiple times, but not enough to learn the route by heart. That lasted entirely too long, because I took forever to get a smartphone. Now that I’ve joined the rest of the world in the 21st Century, I love Google Maps and how it helps me get around town. Now Google’s taking a great product and making it even better by making your map smarter than some drivers.

Google’s new map feature is going to tell you where you’re going automatically. It’s called Driving Mode, and it uses a combination of features to try and figure out where you’re going without you telling it. It takes into account time of day, traffic patterns, search history, set locations you have programmed into your phone, and other notable features pulled from both your personal history and Google Maps. Most importantly, you’ll no longer have to tell your phone where you want to go, which is always a pain in mid-drive.

The ETAs Google Maps promises to provide with Driving Mode only helps make things work a little better for those of us who like to wait until the last minute to try and get somewhere.

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25 Very Hidden iPhone Features

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

The iPhone is a phone with many secrets. For something as user-friendly as most Apple products are, it’s kind of remarkable to consider the fact that the iPhone still has a lot of features that most people will never uncover. Some of these tricks are solutions to common problems, like with the fingerprint identification feature or with the phone’s apparent inability to redial. Others are a bit less common, like the ability to do math without opening the calculator in Spotlight. Here are 25 hidden features in the iPhone.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe just how many things the average smartphone can do. Other times, it’s hard to believe what things the average smartphone won’t do. This list, and lists like it, help to solve a lot of the problems that surround smartphones and make the user experience a little better. How handy would it be to be able to shut down multiple apps with the swipe of your fingers? Very, that’s how.

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A $30 Google Chromecast Comes With A $20 Gift Card

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

People seem to love streaming devices. I have a good television, but it’s not a smart television. I have a good blu-ray player, but again, while it can kind of stream YouTube and Netflix, I wouldn’t go so far as to consider it a smart device. I have an Amazon Fire TV Stick, and I love it. It’s spectacularly useful and a whole lot of fun. I can only imagine just how useful a Chromecast can be, and it’s now on jail. Buy a Chromecast for $30, get $20 to spend on the Google Play store.

That means a Chromecast will be only $10, depending on if you actually want to spend any money on Google Play. I don’t know why you wouldn’t, in all honesty; I use Google Play on occasion and it’s a really good service. That’s a pretty good deal; a Chromecast and a bunch of movies and television shows or whatever for $10? That’s tempting, even for someone who already has one streaming stick. I guess you can never have enough streaming devices, provided that you have enough televisions to stream media with.

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Apple's iPhone Pop-Up Ads

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

There are a lot of people who need phone upgrades. So long as my phone is working, I’m not in any hurry to buy a new one. Most people aren’t, but some people are. If you’re a slow upgrader like I am, sometimes you need a push in the right direction. Apple is supplying that push to some complaints from users. Apple has put pop-up ads for the new iPhone 6S in the App Store interface.

If you’re using an older model iPhone, when you go to the App Store, a full-screen pop-up add appears for the iPhone 6S. The only to get rid of the ad is to press on the skip button (or, I guess, upgrade your phone, but who has that kind of extra money?) Of course, it’s not showing up for all users, just specific ones selected by some sort of Apple interface. I’m not sure how they’re picking the users, but enough of them are complaining about the ads to raise up a slow public backlash.

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Christmas Lights Might Slow Down Your WiFi

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

It’s that time of year. If you haven’t done it already, then you’re making plans to do it. It’s the holidays, and that means it’s time to trim the tree, put up the lights, and do all of the holiday-related decorating that people do around the holidays, myself included. However, all electronics that emit radio waves have a similar issue, and that’s their disruption to home Wi-Fi signals. That’s right, your Christmas lights and other electronic holiday decorations might be slowing down your WiFi.

Ofcom, the UK’s version of the FCC, has stated that lights can cause interference, and blinking lights in particular are a problem for most wireless routers. There are a few times out there, like perhaps adjusting the channel on your router and making sure your router is as far away from your holiday decorations as possible, but for the most part, most users aren’t going to experience a significant slow-down as a result of a few fairy lights hanging off of a plastic tree or stapled under a gutter.

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