Interesting article on Hidden Innovation in the Galaxy S4

[dontpanicbobby]

I saw this article over at SamMobile, I thought other folks might find it interesting.

 

[Hadron]

Though the right-hand column are all standard smartphone features, so not exactly "innovation"

 

[dontpanicbobby]

The two in yellow had already been revealed as well. They are well hidden though if not that innovative. I hope case designers keep these little gizmos in mind.

 

[barryl85]

The two in yellow

??

I can only see one in yellow and that's the proximity sensor

 

[dontpanicbobby]

Gesture Sensor. I'd call that a shade of yellow. I don't have a color chart with me this morning.

 

[Hadron]

To my eyes it's green.

Mind you, my wife and I often disagree on what we call certain colours

 

[dontpanicbobby]

I was talking about the boxes surrounding the descriptions not the little clouds.

 

[GeneralTechniq]

The GESTURE SENSOR (along with proximity and finger hovering tech) will be a godsend for me and my needs, if it works well enough for me to fully operate the phone within all desired apps without having to touch it.

The two in yellow had already been revealed as well. They are well hidden though if not that innovative. I hope case designers keep these little gizmos in mind.

Not quite sure what you mean by that remark, but everyone's entitled to their own "opinion".

My personal "opinion" is that the GESTURE/PROXIMITY SENSORs are some of the most innovative features to hit the cell phone industry since the "touchscreen".
.....imhOPINION
They literally make this phone an instant buy for me. The moment that I'm convinced that these features (gesture, proximity, smart view, finger hovering) will 100% do what I need them to, I'll "instantly" purchase it (cash paid in full).

 

[valorian]

A lot of these are already on the S3 no I'm not sure why this article is saying they are an S4 innovation.

 

[Hadron]

In a word, marketing.

 

[Wolfedude88]

To my eyes it's green.

Mind you, my wife and I often disagree on what we call certain colours

It's definitely green, lol.

 

[RajCaj]

I've seen some on-hands reviews of the S4, where they demonstrated the the motion controls.....and they looked abit laggy.

Specifically, one of the guys demonstrating the phone waved his hand across the front of the phone to page flip....but required him to do it several times, at the right speed, for it to pick up.

Cool functionality, but I'm not sure how graceful the tech is.

Also, there has been some questions raised about the barometer & humidity. Considering many folks will keep the device in their pocket / purse...or strapped to their body during workouts....how accurate & valuable will that info be?

In addition, will the Hall sensor location be problematic for folks that accidently cover it with their hand, or with other non-S cover cases?

 

[EarlyMon]

Barometric sensor will aid in GPS accuracy.

Cool.

 

[Gearu]

Spank gesture recognition will probably take a little while to master. I don't think the people who've done it in videos put much effort into working it. They kinda just waved in front of the phone and hoped for the best, when they should focus on their hand angle and targetting the sensor.
The Queen's wave might work well

 

[dontpanicbobby]

The GESTURE SENSOR (along with proximity and finger hovering tech) will be a godsend for me and my needs, if it works well enough for me to fully operate the phone within all desired apps without having to touch it.

Not quite sure what you mean by that remark, but everyone's entitled to their own "opinion". SNIP.

I wasn't talking about the Gesture sensor at all, just the sensors on the right side which Hadron pointed out. The Gyro Sensor, Accelerometer and Geomagnetic sensors were already out in other devices. I'm pretty sure the Hall sensor on the left side was already out on other devices as well.

 

[Hadron]

Yeah, I was thinking yesterday that a hall magnetometer to detect when a cover was closed is something I've seen before, but not managed to remember where. It may have been some time ago.

 

[davoid]

Yeah, I was thinking yesterday that a hall magnetometer to detect when a cover was closed is something I've seen before, but not managed to remember where. It may have been some time ago.

Yeah, my old Blackberry Curve used to know when it was in its case by detecting the magnet in the sheath-like case, and would go to sleep. And it would wake up on its removal, which I liked.

 

[NeoGrandizer]

Barometric sensor will aid in GPS accuracy.

Cool.

Really? Never knew that. Although if one looks at the original Note, it'll prove otherwise as it was a major issue when some people updated to ICS.

 

[EarlyMon]

Really? Never knew that. Although if one looks at the original Note, it'll prove otherwise as it was a major issue when some people updated to ICS.

First introduced for Android on the Galaxy Nexus to give more accurate elevations more rapidly.

Although, the Devil's in the details.

 

[rushmore]

Seems like without all the polling for these functions, battery life would be better. Can we turn some of this junk (IMO) off?

 

[Hadron]

Mobile-review say in their review that battery life is indeed improved if you disable some of the sensors.

 

[rushmore]

Good! So the sensors can be turned off via settings?

Next hope will be an improved radio chipset. We can spin all day, but the US VZW version at least has weak 3G and bouncy 3G/4G. Battery sucking mess with weak signal. Worse than any other phone device I have owned with weak signal. Besides that, the S3 is IMO great with everything else.

Added: Everything has a positive and negative. Wonder if the same ones for the S4?

 

[Puppa]

The Note 2 also has a barometer, which has proven very useful and accurate for me.

 

[trparky]

Can't blame the hardware entirely when it comes to Verizon and the GS3.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... CDMA and LTE was never meant to be paired together. They are two totally different network architectures and getting them to play nice together requires quite a bit of technical voodoo and sometimes that "voodoo" doesn't always work. CDMA requires completely different provisioning hardware from LTE.

So no, I don't blame the device for the issues. I blame Verizon's poor choice to stick with CDMA when they should've gone with GSM years ago when the rest of the world went GSM too.

They are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Keep with CDMA2000 which has no future or try to develop a way to transition to something newer, in this case it's LTE. But, in the process of doing that you have to create a way to transition over. The faster Verizon dumps CDMA2000 the better it will be for everyone on that service.

 

[Magnus Ochncap]

Can't blame the hardware entirely when it comes to Verizon and the GS3.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... CDMA and LTE was never meant to be paired together. They are two totally different network architectures and getting them to play nice together requires quite a bit of technical voodoo and sometimes that "voodoo" doesn't always work. CDMA requires completely different provisioning hardware from LTE.

So no, I don't blame the device for the issues. I blame Verizon's poor choice to stick with CDMA when they should've gone with GSM years ago when the rest of the world went GSM too.

They are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Keep with CDMA2000 which has no future or try to develop a way to transition to something newer, in this case it's LTE. But, in the process of doing that you have to create a way to transition over. The faster Verizon dumps CDMA2000 the better it will be for everyone on that service.

trparky, very little of this is true.

LTE is the natural upgrade path to CDMA. The 3GPP2 has been working on eHRPD as a bridging technology since 2007, and the 3GPP and 3GPP2 groups announced LTE as the evolution to CDMA networks in early 2009.

Originally UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) was being developed by Qualcomm as the CDMA 4G upgrade path inside of the 3GPP2, but that project was canceled in Nov 2008 in favor of LTE (and the provisional success of eHRPD).

eHRPD is the bridging technology that, when LTE-capable devices connect to towers that transmit both CDMA 1X/EV-DO and LTE, sends traffic into the all-IP network LTE core (rather than the MSC-based circuit-switch core). eHRPD is reliable and works just fine; it isn't voodoo. It is the supported standard from the 3GPP and 3GPP2. Basically, Verizon relied on geographically dispersed Mobile Switching Centers prior to LTE. If one MSC went down, all calls/data in a region failed. The LTE network can be setup to dynamically connect to different cores for routing, increasing reliability.

Originally Verizon did not enable that dynamic routing technology on the LTE cores, so they had the same regional failures if a specific routing core pooped. They've since enabled dynamic core routing as they upgrade swaths of the country; LTE downtime should be practically non-existant when they finish with a region. Save, you know, backhaul failure.

And what was Verizon's alternative to going forward with the new LTE equipment and eHRPD overlay? Verizon had 44,xxx towers the last time they publicized a specific number, and more now with subsequent acquisitions. Should they have added a second, completely disparate HSPA network on those 44k+ towers that none of their 100 million existing users devices could connect? And then replace those 100 million user devices with HSPA variants? And then upgrade to LTE anyway? And have users replace devices again? That would be a silly waste of capital expenditures, spectrum, and user goodwill.

The connectivity problems of the Galaxy S3 are divided into two groups: 1) users in LTE fringe areas, cycling back and forth between EV-DO and LTE, and 2) Samsung.

Remember, Samsung phones up and down the product lines had Bluetooth problems, GPS problems, WiFi problems, and cellular network issues. Ugh.

But the Samsung issues have been getting better and better. I'll be picking up a Galaxy S4 on Verizon's launch day, and keeping my fingers crossed that it is as reliable as my other Verizon LTE devices. Otherwise, it will go back. =P And then I'll be waiting again for the next best thing...