A New Form Factor for the Phone?

By | October 9, 2019
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photo @arubin via twitter

The smartphone hasn’t changed much, at least in terms of proportions, since the first iPhone (the iPhone belatedly adopted the 16:9 aspect ratio most other phones had long assumed in 2012 with the iPhone 5). Yes, Samsung made it bigger, an idea considered dumb at the time but one which has largely become the norm. Phones have gotten thinner — anorexic, in the words of one writer — which has produced its own problems (and may hold back 5G). But the essential dimensions of the phone haven’t changed in more than 10 years. 

That is, sort of, changing, with Samsung’s Fold and the Surface Duo hinged Android phone. But that in itself isn’t that radical — both are just two phones stuck together, design-wise, which is something that designers have been playing with for a while. (I wrote about bendable screens back in 2013 and revisited it a year ago).

Step up Andy Rubin, the former Android guy who left Google over allegations of sexual misconduct (retaining a huge severance package). He now works at Essential, which make a nice-looking but essentially conventionally sized phone. 

The phone, pictured above, seems to be about the same length as a conventional phone, but is maybe half the width. At first that doesn’t seem to make any sense, but looking at the way it sits in the hand, it seems to fit more snugly. I’m guessing the idea here is that most of the time we’re operating a phone with one hand while moving — walking, on a bus, hopefully not driving, jogging, abseiling, windsurfing, under-the-desk-in-meetings — so this form factor makes a lot of sense. I assume that’s why the screenshots are of maps. 

And I suppose that lain horizontal it would make for one pretty cool cinematic perspective. Although nowadays everyone seems to be shooting vertically, so who knows? It’s not clear whether this phone is an Essential one according to Sean Hollister at the Verge.

It’s good that we’re seeing experimentation in this space again. This isn’t a massive leap forward, but it does suggest that some minds are showing signs of thinking outside the box. It also shows that we are probably using our phones in ways we didn’t a few years ago. Certainly navigating the average street these days involves having to dodge people glued to videos or games while in motion. 

Smart cities without digging

By | October 8, 2019
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Smart cities sound like a great idea — who wouldn’t want your city to be smart, or at least smarter? — but it usually involves lots of digging. What if we could have the sensors that make cities smart, without the holes?

Sensors need to be lain in the ground, or on street furniture, and often cables lain to connect them. This means more holes, which is something residents don’t like. A mayor in the Indian state of Goa threatened to seize the equipment of the local smart city corporation, Imagine Panaji Smart City Development Corporation Ltd, in May after they ignored the city’s ban on digging up its streets. (India is in the throes of developing 100 smart cities and is trying to come up with alternatives to the chaos wrought by digging — the city of Dehradun is proposing a ‘multi utility duct’ (see illustration) to house electricity cables and telephone cables. “This will avoid frequent digging roads for connections and repair of telephone cables.” Not a pretty solution, I have to say.) 

Anyway, for those cities that already have broadband fibre lain in the ground, Verizon has an interesting solution: converting these fibre cables into sensors using a technology called optical fibre sensing. Optical fibre sensing is used for monitoring power cables, tunnels, mines, railways and dams for fires, temperature, strain, rupture  — or even for whether someone violates a perimeter. But they require laying purpose-built cable, usually close to the surface. 

Verizon and NEC said this week they had used software and AI to monitor traffic — including density of vehicles, direction, speed, acceleration and deceleration — on Verizon’s existing communications cables. Purpose-built optical fibre has long been used for sensing but this, the two companies say, is the first time it can do both — carrying high speed data, while also performing sensing. 

The technology needn’t just be used for traffic: the companies say it could also “support public functions such as helping first responders detect and respond to gun shots and enhancing municipalities’ ability to more quickly and efficiently identify earlier deterioration of bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure.” 

“This test marks an important milestone for technology that could provide a huge leap forward for those building smart cities and those tasked to manage them,” the press release quoted Adam Koeppe, Senior Vice President of Technology Planning and Development with Verizon as saying. “Instead of ripping up tarmac to place road and traffic-sensing technology, cities will be able to simply piggyback Verizon’s existing fiber optic network.”

They’re not the only ones trying to make use of existing fibre without more digging. A British company called OptaSense is developing something called Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) that “enables continuous, real-time measurements along the entire length of a new or existing, single mode fibre optic cable. The fibre optic cable is transformed into a sensor by an Interrogator Unit plugged onto the end of a single unused spare core.” The unit injects a pulse of laser light into the cable which then creates a “virtual microphone” every 10 metres along the cable. The sensor would be able to detect different size vehicles, traffic jams etc. (It wasn’t clear from the Verizon press release whether their solution also required the presence of a similiar unit or some other hardware installation.)

5G’s Achilles Heel: Heat

By | October 7, 2019
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5G promises a lot. a mobile internet of things, new immersive VR and AR experiences, lower latency, washboard stomachs. But something the industry isn’t addressing is that the devices themselves heat up. A lot. This from Digits to Dollars‘ Jonathan Goldberg: 

5G phones get hot. Really hot. Probably not hot enough to ignite your battery (probably), but enough to generate a definite burning sensation in your pants pockets. At Mobile World Congress in February, we spoke with an engineer from Sony who was demo’ing a phone (behind glass) that was clocking 1 Gbps speeds. Wow, fast. We asked the engineer why it was not going faster and he said “It overheats.” A good solid answer, from a nuts-and-bolts-and-antenna person. We will wager any amount that at next year’s show, no one on the floor will be as open about this problem.

The industry, Goldberg writes, is tackling this issue by er, ignoring it. And indeed the standard response appears to be that “we’ve seen heat problems with every new generation and what we have with 5G is nothing significant, 3G was way worse,” as one commenter said he’d been told at a 5G conference. But that may be underestimating the problem — Goldberg says the “heat budget” is 67% higher than current phones. (Heat budget is the total amount of thermal energy transferred to the chip when the device is in operation.) And he points out that both no-one seems yet to be offering a solutions and “solving the issue in 3G broke a couple vendors.” 

Some background: what we call 5G is actually two stages of technology. What most carriers are currently rolling out is phase 1, or what is called, confusingly, sub 6, an evolution of 4G that bring (quoting Goldberg again in a different post): “modest improvements in data rates as well as some important, but hard to observe, changes in the software the operators use to run their networks.” The big step will be the second phase, mmWave, “will bring much more tangible changes, notably including data rates at or above 1 Gbps.”It’s these mmWave radios that are (indirectly) causing the problem. 

As I understand it, these mmWave operate at very high frequencies — close to microwave — which require high clock speeds in the chips. The heat this creates is concentrated in a small subset of the electronic components within the phone, and there’s no easy way to move that energy around. Goldberg again: 

Of course there are some solutions, but none of them are complete and they all have serious drawbacks. It turns out that the way we cool electronics has not advanced in 40 years. There are really two methods used currently to cool Things down- Fans and Dissipation.

Fans are what you think they are. Anyone who has ever opened up their desktop PC or overclocked their laptop knows what these look like. But fans have two problems: they are big and they have moving parts. Both of those require design decisions that go counter to every mobile design trend in the past 15 years.

Dissipation is just the idea of moving the heat around to hasten air cooling. In a PC, this is typified by those funny looking prong-things that sit on top of CPUs. Those things are too tall to fit inside a 10mm thick phone. So for mobiles, OEMs are looking at using ‘straws’, or copper pipes that span the length of the phone. These take up a lot of space and inserting a large conductive element (copper!) inside a phone wreaks havoc on mobile radios, (i.e. hurting data rates).

We all know the problems of overheating phones, but what is surprising is how little this issue seems to be addressed. Goldberg says that this is a problem on a whole new level to previous generations, and one that is only now being addressed: “The problems with 5G mmWave are larger and will not go away as quickly. Handset makers are just waking up to the existence of this problem.”

The only place to find discussion of this issue appears to be in academia, which itself notes the lack of discussion. In a paper published last year three researchers at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology wrote (PDF):

the heat dissipation of smartphones restricts the maximum receiving rate of smartphones. Although the maximum receiving rate of smartphones is restricted by the computation capability and heat dissipation, detailed studies of basic models used for evaluating the maximum receiving rate of smartphones are surprisingly rare in the available literature.

The researchers ran their own tests and reached some sobering conclusions: 

– anything above 4 Gbps and the temperature of the smartphone reaches above 45 C “within a few seconds.” (5G has promised peak data rates up to 20 Gbps and Qualcomm’s first 5G modem “is designed to achieve up to 5Gbps downlink peak data rate.” So the smartphone has to “decrease the computation capability of the chip to reduce the heat generation, e.g., decrease the working frequency of the chip, to prevent low-temperature burns on the user’s skin. Thus, smartphones cannot sustain the original receiving rate and may even have to shut off wireless communications.” This is obviously not an optimal outcome. This is already happening with the first mmWave 5G rollouts (what AT&T calls 5G+) — which, remember, is not the one that involves mmWave radios: The Wall Street Journal wrote in July that their Galaxy S10’s 5G switched off in the Icelandic summer. Others have reported similar problems.

The researchers recommend that to address this”using new materials or redesigning the components’ structure to improve the heat conduction rate from the chip to other low-temperature components in smartphones. Additionally, mobile edge computing, one of the 5G technologies, can be applied to improve the maximum receiving rate of smartphones by offloading the computation assignments in the chips.” It’s hard to imagine that would be a welcome advance, since as I understand it it would mean transferring a lot of the hard work from the phone to the base station — and who exactly would pay for that? 

The researchers are, in their academic way, somewhat scathing of how the field has failed to address the serious matter of device heat: “In 5G and future 6G cellular networks, most of research is focused on the core networks and BSs. However, many potential impacts triggered by the maximum receiving rate of smartphones have not yet been investigated. How to design reasonable mobile terminals for matching with 5G and future 6G wireless communication systems is still an open issue for industries and academic researchers.” 

That was a year ago. One can only hope the device manufacturers are addressing this. For now, it seems to make sense to take 5G promises with a pinch of salt and a bucket of ice.

Too Far Ahead of the Curve?

By | October 9, 2019
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Imperial Furniture Museum [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Imperial Furniture Museum [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons

My former employers used (I’m stressing used here ) to like my tech stories because they had never heard about the stuff I wrote about before, which was considered good. But in later years as the editors were replaced by other, saner heads, and there were grumbles.

Write about what’s happening now, not what’s going to happen, was usually the refrain. They had a point. But I didn’t think that was my job, and I still don’t. But it does raise a question which journalists in any field often have to address: When is the right time to write about something that you know will happen, but hasn’t happened yet?

Take curved and foldable screens.

We have the former already, in TVs and the occasional Samsung mobile phone. And the excellent and venerated Tim Bajarin, who has watched this world since the early 1980s, writes in Tech.pinions this week (subscription required) about Samsung being about to introduce their first foldable smartphone. His headline says it all: Apple’s Foldable iPhone Patents and the Inevitability of Foldable Displays

He points to a patent that Patently Apple wrote about which specifically covered a foldable iPhone — submitted to the patent office years ago. “That means,” Tim writes, “that Apple has been working on a foldable iPhone for quite some time and this is not a knee-jerk reaction to Samsung doing a foldable phone now.” While Tim is more interested in the legal implications, I’m more interested in the journalistic implications — when is it too soon to write about these things?

Well, I wrote about flexible displays for Reuters back in 2013, and I was by no means a trailblazer:

The touted arrival this year of wearable gadgets such as computer displays strapped to wrists and in wrap-around glasses is just a step towards a bigger revolution in screens – those that can be bent, folded and rolled up.

Once freed from today’s relatively heavy, breakable and fixed glass displays, tomorrow’s devices may look very different, with screens that can be rolled out, attached to uneven surfaces, or even stretched.

But there’s still some way to go.

“It becomes a product designer’s paradise – once the technology is sorted out,” says Jonathan Melnick, who analyses display technology for Lux Research.

There is no shortage of prototypes – South Korea’s Samsung Electronics this year showed off a display screen that extends from the side of a device – but obstacles remain: overcoming technical issues, figuring out how to mass produce parts cheaply, and coming up with devices compelling enough for gadget buyers. The story went on in that vein. I didn’t really tease out anything new, but if I had cared to look I would have found that Apple was filing patents around that time on flexible displays, which became the basis of its later more elaborate patent filings. This one, for example, was filed on April 20, 2012, a year before my story, and was titled “Electronic devices with flexible displays having fastened bent edges”.

My argument as a technology journalist is that it’s never too early to write about a technology if you can prove that it’s real — that means, are there people investing in it, turning it into something that can be practical used? It doesn’t have to be generating revenue, it doesn’t have to have a business model, it doesn’t have to have a customer, it doesn’t even have to have a tried and tested use case. But if I was someone making investment decisions I would prefer to know that somewhere down the track — and I would hope the journalist would give me an idea of how far that track might be in the story — this technology is going to find its way to market. I wouldn’t want to wait. My argument — and they were quite frequently arguments — was that if we waited until usual newsroom yardsticks applied, we would never write about Facebook, Google, Baidu, Alibaba, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix or any of these industry-shifting companies until they’d already shifted industries.

But five years? Was that too early? I don’t think so, but I’m biased.

Windshift: Malware Recycled

By | October 5, 2018
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A recently published deck (PDF) by Abu Dhabi-based DarkMatter’s Taha Karim draws an interesting conclusion: that an Indian cybersecurity group called Appin, active a few years ago, was either targeted by an advanced APT group (and its tools stolen), or its tools stolen by a rogue employee, or that its tools were sold to a third party. The reason: Karim found evidence of Appin’s tools and infrastructure in covert hacks into governments by a group with overlaps to several existing APT actors, some with links to Russia.

The groups that Karim’s report finds overlaps with (either modus operandi, infrastructure, similarities in coding practice etc) are:

The possible connection with Appin is in a likely rewrite of surveillance malware called Hack Back aka KitM OSX: DarkMatter found the exact helper function re-used, the same C&C servers and some other similarities.

DarkMatter calls the APT it has discovered Windshift and says it is currently targeting government using Appin tools. It does not attempt to offer attribution, says it’s been operating since at least January 2017, goes after specific individuals (judging from the screenshots, Gulf states) using “versatile, sophisticated and unpredictable” spearphish, and is still active.

Appin was an Indian cybersecurity company blamed in some accounts for cyberespionage attacks back in 2013. The company fiercely denied the reports. Not much has been heard of the company since though reports of its tools appearing elsewhere have surfaced from time to time. Last Year a company called Cymmetria believed it saw a connection with Appin in an attack it called Patchwork that was aimed at South Asian and Southeast Asian targets, and appeared to be ‘pro-Indian’:

Carefully, we feel obligated to note that further evidence suggests potential links between this threat actor and the operations known as Hangover/Appin, but this possible link is still being researched and is far from conclusive.

Appin has been out of the public eye for a few years now, but its CEO, Rajat Khare has recently resurfaced as an investor, via his Boundary Holding company, in a Singapore video analytics startup called XRVision.