The electronic brains behind the supercomputer in your pocket
Welcome to Smartphone Futurology. In this new series of science-filled articles, Mobile Nations guest contributor Shen Ye walks through current technologies in use within our phones, as well as the cutting-edge stuff still being developed in the lab. There’s quite a bit of science ahead, as a lot of the future discussions are based on scientific papers with a vast amount of technical jargon, but we’ve tried to keep things as plain and simple as possible. So if you want to dive deeper into just how the guts of your phone function, this is the series for you.
A new year brings the certainty of new devices to play with, and so it’s time to look ahead at what we might see in the smartphones of the future. The first instalment in the series covered what’s new in battery tech, while the second article looked at what’s next in the world of mobile displays. The series’ third part focuses on the electronic brains of our mobile devices — the SoC (system on a chip) and flash storage. The rise of smartphones, and fierce competition among rival manufacturers, has accelerated the pace of technological progress in both these areas. And we’re not done yet — there are ever wilder technologies on the horizon that may some day find their way into future devices. Read on to find out more.