Larger Mobile Devices
Once upon a time, in the era of using a desktop as your personal computer and looking to “luggables” if you needed portability, mobility was a luxury, if not a novelty. In stark contrast, today’s mobile devices can be so small that the likelihood of misplacing your computing device is a real and ongoing concern. Furthermore, the physical size of the smaller devices is not conducive to comfortable computing.
When a larger screen and more convenient controls are desired, there are two popular solutions: laptops/netbooks and tablets. These two broad families of larger mobile devices are similar in their portability but differ in other aspects. For instance, you can use a laptop when a real keyboard, desktop-class operating system, external connections, and larger display are in order. Otherwise, and when maximum portability is key, a tablet, such as Apple’s iPad, can often get the job done with maximum convenience. However, certain functionality has to be left behind to pay for the handiness. The following sections will illuminate the characteristics that either bind the technologies or set them apart.
Field Servicing and Upgrading
Ever since the dawn of the portable computer, manufacturers and service providers have based a percentage of their success on warranties and “house calls” to repair devices on the fritz. It’s a fact that quasi-fixed components, such as displays and motherboards, are widely considered replaceable with only identical components in laptops and similar devices. However, technically minded users could take it upon themselves to expand the capabilities of their own system by, for instance, upgrading the hard drive, increasing RAM, using PC Cards and flash devices, attaching wired peripherals, and inserting discs.
Although the ability to repair and expand the functionality of portable devices in the field has become all but obviated, it has been shown with current and past generations of mobile devices that users are not averse to giving up these capabilities as long as functionality and convenience outshine the loss.
Although many Android and other non-Apple devices allow the replacement of batteries and the use of removable memory cards as primary storage, even this basic level of access is removed in Apple’s mobile devices, including its iPad line of tablets. In an effort to produce a sleeker mobile phone, even Android devices have been developed without user access to the battery. For Apple, however, in addition to producing a nice compact package, it is all part of keeping the technology as closed to adulteration as possible. Supporters of this practice recognize the resulting long-term quality. Detractors lament the lack of options.
To service closed mobile devices of any size, it is necessary to seek out an authorized repair facility and take or send your device to them for service. Attempting your own repairs will not only void any remaining warranty but likely render the device unusable. Apple’s devices, for example, require a special tool to open them. You cannot simply dig between the seams of the case to pop the device open. Even if you get such a device open, there is no standard consumer pipeline for parts, whether for repair or upgrading.
Anyone who has been around the business for more than just a few years has likely seen their fair share of components and systems with no user-serviceable parts. For these situations, an authorized technician can be dispatched to your location, home or work, with the appropriate tools, parts, and skill to field-service the system for you. On a slightly different, perhaps subtle, note, the bottom line here is that many of today’s mobile devices, including some of the larger tablet-style devices, have no field-serviceable parts inside, let alone user-serviceable parts. In some extremes, special work environments similar to the original clean manufacturing environment have to be established for servicing.
Input Methods
With decreased size come increased interaction difficulties. Human interfaces can become only so small without the use of projection or virtualization. In other words, a computer the size of a postage stamp is fine as long as it can project a full-sized keyboard and a 60″ display, for example. Using microscopic real interfaces would not sell much product. So, the conundrum is that users want smaller devices but do not want to have to wear a jeweler’s loupe or big-screen virtualization glasses to interact with their petite devices.
As long as the size of the devices remains within the realm of human visibility and interaction, modern technology allows for some pretty convenient methods of user input. All devices from the tablet size down are equipped with the touchscreens discussed earlier in this chapter, supplying onscreen keyboards and other virtual input interfaces. On top of that, more and more of the screens are developing the ability to detect more than one contact point.
Generically, this technology is referred to in the industry as multi-touch and is available on all Apple devices with touch input, including the touch pads of the Apple laptops. Apple, through its acquisition of the company Fingerworks, holds patents for the capacitive multi-touch technology featured on its products. Today, multi-touch is more about functionality than novelty. Nevertheless, the markets for both business and pleasure exist for multi-touch.
Certainly, touchscreens with the ability to sense 300 separate points of contact can allow large-scale collaboration or fun at parties. Imagine a coffee table that can allow you to pull out the jigsaw puzzle, with the touch of an icon, remembering where you and three friends left off. Imagine all of you being able to manipulate pieces independently and simultaneously and being able to send the puzzle away again as quickly as you brought it out so that you can watch the game on the same surface. This technology exists and is for sale today. Check out products built on Microsoft’s PixelSense technology, including the Samsung SUR40, once marketed as Microsoft Surface.
On a smaller scale, our mobile devices allow us to pinch and stretch images on the screen by placing multiple fingers on the screen at the same time. Even touch pads on laptops can be made to differentiate any number of fingers being used at the same time, each producing a different result, including pointing and clicking, scrolling and right-clicking, and dragging, all one-handed with no need to press a key or mouse button while gesturing.
HTC created an early touchscreen software interface called TouchFLO that has matured into HTC Sense and is still in use today on its Android and Windows line of mobile devices. TouchFLO is not multi-touch capable, nor does it specify the physical technology behind the touchscreen, only the software application for it. Theoretically, then, TouchFLO and multi-touch could be combined.
The primary contribution of TouchFLO was the introduction to the market of an interface that the user perceives as multiple screens, each of which is accessible by an intuitive finger gesture on the screen to spin around to a subsequent page. On various devices using this concept, neighboring pages have been constructed as side by side as well as above and below one another. Apple’s mobile devices employ gestures owing to the contributions of TouchFLO, bringing the potential of combining TouchFLO-like technology and multi-touch to bear.
Users of early HTC devices with resistive touchscreen technology met with difficulty and discord when flowing to another screen. The matte texture of the early resistive screens was not conducive to smooth gesturing. The capacitive touchscreen technology is a welcome addition to such a user interface, making gestures smooth and even more intuitive than ever.
Secondary Storage
Computers of all sizes and capabilities use similar forms of RAM for primary storage—the storage location for currently running instructions and data. Secondary storage—the usually nonvolatile location where these instructions and data are stored on a more permanent basis—is another story. Larger systems still favor conventional hard disk drives—with magnetic spinning disks, larger overall capacity, and less cost per byte—over the newer solid state drives. This discussion was presented first in Chapter 2, “Storage Devices and Power Supplies.”
The primary concern with smaller devices is the shock they tend to take as the user makes their way through a typical day. Simply strapping a phone to your hip and taking the Metro to work presents a multitude of opportunities for a spinning disk to meet with catastrophe. The result would be the frequent loss of users’ information from a device that they count on more and more as technology advances.
Just as many telephony subscribers migrate from a home landline that stays put to a cell phone that follows them everywhere, many casual consumers are content to use their mobile device as their primary or only computing system, taking it wherever they go. As a result, the data must survive conditions more brutal than most laptops because laptops are most often shut down before being transported.
The most popular solution is to equip mobile devices with solid-state drives (SSDs) in the place of traditional magnetic disk drives. There are no moving parts; the drive stays cooler and resists higher temperature extremes; and SSDs require less power to run than their conventional counterparts.