Netizen: Qualcomm

Showing posts with label Qualcomm. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Google's Modular Phone Challenges OnePlus One

The Nexus phone was a breath of fresh air. But I thought the OnePlus One did challenge the Nexus brand. Now I think Google's modular phone is a major challenge to the OnePlus One, and other smartphones in general. My current phone is still Nexus 4. I wish I could get a battery that lasted twice as long, and I wish I could replace my 5 MP camera with a 10 or 13 or 15 MP camera. But other than that, I am quite happy with my phone. And the modular phone is supposed to allow you just such upgrades. You don't ditch the whole phone. You just upgrade a part you want to upgrade. I like that. And I love the price point. $50. Finally a smartphone for the global masses. And, yes, I also want 64 GB. My 8 GB has felt inadequate as soon as I got my phone!

Google’s modular $50 smartphone set for January 2015 release

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Innovating The Smartphone Battery

If my smartphone battery gave me four times more juice, it might last a full day of rigorous use. But it doesn't.

Battery is hard to do, but worth trying. But maybe Samsung should plot to move to one of the next big things: rHealth.

In fast food it is not McDonald's that is number one. The Chinese restaurants collectively are bigger. The same seems to be true of smartphones. Samsung is like McDonald's. It is number two.

Samsung’s Future Is Bleak Because Phones Themselves No Longer Matter

With the possible exception of radically improved battery life, hardware differences become about subtle preferences, not clear-cut metrics of superiority.

rHEALTH And One Drop Of Blood

This is a health care assistant that Fidel Castro could only have dreamed of. Like the smartphone is the computer for the final six billion, this device is the doctor for the final three billion, or maybe six. And I am sure there will be improvements. It is awesome as is, and it will get better. Finally a health "app" that actually does something serious pretty fast.

Heck, this is not just something for the have nots. This will displace many mainstream devices currently in use. This has the ease of a good old thermometer.

This Device Diagnoses Hundreds of Diseases Using a Single Drop of Blood

a portable handheld device that can diagnose hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood with what Chan claims is gold-standard accuracy. ..... First hatched by DMI in response to a NASA challenge to create a diagnostics device that could work even in space, rHEALTH was portable from the beginning. ..... One small drop of blood is dropped into a small receptacle, where nanostrips and reagents react to the blood’s contents. The whole cocktail then goes through a spiral micro-mixer and is streamed past lasers that use variations in light intensity and scattering to come up with a diagnosis, from flu to a more serious illness such as pneumonia—or even Ebola—within a few minutes. ..... There’s also a vitals patch that users can wear to get continuous health readings—EKG, heart rate, body temperature—delivered to their smartphone or the rHEALTH device itself via a Bluetooth link. An app called CHAS (Comprehensive Health Assessment Unit) can walk the user through the process of self-diagnosis. ....... getting all the diagnostics technologies packed together into one handheld device ..... patients will need to give 1,500 times less blood than they would for regular tests ..... the device has even been tested in simulated lunar and zero gravity. “It’s a symphony of innovations, but we’ve pushed all of them individually to create the device” ..... rHEALTH is reliable for cell counts, HIV detection, vitamin D levels, and various protein markers in the body. The next challenges .. are adding more tests, scaling up production, and going through the laborious process of getting the rHEALTH commercialized. ...... three different models: the rHEALTH One, which will be used for translational research; the rHEALTH X, meant to be used as a kind of power tool for clinicians; and the rHEALTH X1, which will be available for consumers. ...... The goal is to create a universal, Star Trek-inspired medical diagnostic tool that detects up to 16 separate health conditions

Friday, June 06, 2014

Wild Hardware Startup

Liu, who’d backed UCWeb, first heard Lei’s pitch over the phone, in a call that lasted from 9 at night to 9 in the morning. Liu recalls that Lei described a smartphone company that moved with the speed of an Internet startup, listening and responding to users, selling hardware at or near cost, and earning a profit on accessories and Internet services. Liu ended up supplying half of the initial $10 million in capital. The VC arm of Qualcomm kicked in a minority investment.

Xiaomi's Phones Have Conquered China. Now It's Aiming for the Rest of the World

Friday, October 26, 2012

The Nexus 4 Phone

Google to unveil Android 4.2, Nexus 4 phone, Nexus 10 tablet

The smartphone will have a quad-core SnapDragon processor from Qualcomm, 2 gigabytes of RAM, a 1,280x768 display, 16GB of internal storage, and an 8-megapixel camera.

LG Nexus 4 photos leaked and Android 4.2 confirmed

the 4.7-inch touch screen display with a 1280×768 resolution, 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and up to 16GB of internal memory. On the back of the smartphone, you are going to find an 8MP camera with a smaller 1.3MP webcam on the front and 2GB of RAM to keep things moving smooth. A smaller 2,100mAh battery is going to be in the phone, but that will still get you around the 8-10 hours of talk time since phones are more efficient these days

Sunday, October 07, 2012

Government Has Its Role

Sure. Absolutely. No doubt.

The Seeds That Federal Money Can Plant

eight computing technologies, including digital communications, databases, computer architectures and artificial intelligence, tracing government-financed research to commercialization. It calculated the portion of revenue at 30 well-known corporations that could be traced back to the seed research backed by government agencies. The total was nearly $500 billion a year...... “If you take any major information technology company today, from Google to Intel to Qualcomm to Apple to Microsoft and beyond, you can trace the core technologies to the rich synergy between federally funded universities and industry research and development” ..... the exceptional role that science and technology play in the economy. ..... America ranks 22nd among 30 nations in university funding and research and development funding as a share of the economy’s gross domestic product. ..... define innovation as not only the generation of new ideas but also as their adoption in new products, processes, services and organizational models. In their view, the goal of policy should be to invest in and nurture the development of the innovation pipeline, from basic science to commercialization. ..... “The grants are really helpful when you’re working on something that is scientifically complex,” Mr. von Ahn says, “when you’re in the early year, or two or more, when you have no idea if it will work.” ..... “Don’t eat your seed corn. It may seem like an easy thing to cut now. But years later, you will regret that you did not invest a tiny portion of your federal budget in research, in the future.”