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Mobile Innovations Magazine

Celebrating new discoveries in the mobile space

NEWS

RECENT NEWS

Stay on top of the latest happenings in the mobile world.

New Corning Gorilla Glass 6 can survive 15 consecutive drops

Corning Incorporated has recently announced its most durable cover glass to date. Unlike the previous Gorilla versions, Glass 6 was engineered with the goal of surviving multiple drops.

On average, people tend to drop their phones once or twice per month, and most drops occur at heights of three feet or below.

During lab tests, Gorilla Glass 6 managed to survive 15 drops from an approximate height of 3.3 feet onto rough surfaces, a result that is two times better than the one achieved by Gorilla Glass 5.

Corning's cover glasses are known for their optical clarity, scratch resistance, touch sensitivity and durability. So, it isn't surprising that over six billion smartphones and tablets utilize them.

New dual-screen watch has a huge battery life

If you are the proud owner of a smart watch, you already know that it needs to be charged on a daily basis. Okay, with some clever tricks you may be able to use your watch without charging it for two or three days, but let's be honest and admit that this is still inconvenient.

Various manufacturers have tried to improve their watches' battery lives for quite some time now, but the results of their work haven't been that impressive. Until now, that is. Mobvoi's Ticwatch Pro utilizes two different screen layers to give us the best of both worlds: screen brightness and/or a huge battery life.

If you are away from the grid, you can turn on the LCD display, and thus have the watch run for a full month without needing to be recharged. And when power isn't an issue, you can utilize the OLED screen, which still has a very respectable 5-day battery life.

ADcase helps protects your dropped iPhone

Phones are getting more and more expensive, so people try to discover and use accessories that are supposed to protect them. So, manufacturers have invented protective cases with cool names such as Urban Armor, and so on, which do a decent job most of the time.

Nevertheless, the big majority of these cases aren't able to protect those very expensive, and yet very fragile phone screens. But now, ADcase (the shorter version of "Active Damping case") wants to change that for good.

ADcase is a Frenzel + Mayer solutions product. Philip Frenzel and Peter Mayer are two students from Germany, and Frenzel has created ADcase as its thesis project. The product was designed for iPhones and utilizes a few sensors that can determine if your phone is falling. When that happens, several curled dampers pop up automatically, protecting the phone. If all goes as planned, the Kickstarted campaign will be launched within the following few weeks.

 

4G projector streams movies on the go

There are several portable projectors out there! Take Apeman, for example; it's got a size of 3.9 x 3.8 x 0.89 inches, and can project an image that's got a dimension of up to 60 inches. However, if you'd like to watch the latest episode in your favorite series while you are camping, you will need a different type of product.

According to its makers, FuntaSee is the first 4G portable projector that utilizes Android as its operating system. It has a 120-inch projected image and provides support for any type of GSM sim card.

And the fun part doesn't stop here; FuntaSee can also be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot, allowing your other devices to connect to the Internet through it.

The projector uses an 8,000 mAh battery, which allows it to run for about 3 hours before needing a charger. It incorporates a decent 8GB on-board memory, which allows it to store a few of your favorite movies and play them even when you don't have access to the Internet.

 

 

SD Express cards reach a 128 TB capacity

Secure Digital cards are non-volatile memory modules, being built using the standards that are developed by the non-profit SD Association. The newest version, called "SD Express", was recently announced by the organization.

The most impressive features of the new 7.0 standard are the increased data transfer rates of 985 MB/s (about 50% faster than the previous standard) and the maximum storage capacity of 128 TB (up from the 2 TB limit of the 6.0 standard).

This makes it possible to utilize SD cards for very demanding applications, such as 8K video recording.

Since very few interfaces can provide matching data transfer speeds, SD Express will offer support for PCI Express, which can currently provide up to 4 GB/s, and for the NVM Express interface, which can reach 2 GB/s.

 

AR dongle turns your phone into an accurate tape measure

Truth be told, there haven't been too many inventions (or at least innovations) in the measuring tools industry within the last few years. Fortunately, Arrim ONE is a revolutionary measuring device that is supposed to change all of that.

Its creators market it as a "professional" augmented reality measuring device. Arrim ONE uses an array of laser diodes which emit light, being able to measure straight lines, circle diameters and angles, and then superimpose this information over the real-time image that is displayed by your smartphone. As you move around the room, the dedicated measuring app will create a 3D map of the environment, highlighting the desired distances on the screen.

The dongle has a size of 2 x 1.2 x 0.6 inches and only weighs 1.2 oz. It incorporates its own lithium-ion power source, which can be used for up to 1,000 measurements. Reportedly, the measuring errors are below 0.06 inches for objects that are closer than 66 feet. This level of accuracy puts the device in the "professional" measuring tool category indeed.

 

Zanco tiny t1 is the world's smallest, fully functional phone

Some of you can probably remember that the world's first portable phone was quite big, and it had a big price tag as well. Then, phone manufacturers have tried to squeeze their products into smaller and smaller cases. And then, a new trend emerged. People wanted their phones to have larger screens, and smartphone makers were quick to fulfill their wishes.

So, is there room for a tiny phone in a world that is dominated by huge smartphones? Zanco believes that the answer to this question is affirmative. Their recently launched tiny t1 phone measures 1.8 x 0.8 x 0.47 inches and only weighs 0.46 oz. Its tiny screen has a resolution of 64 x 32 pixels.

The tiny (yeah, I know I'm repeating myself) battery has a capacity of 200 mAh and, according to Zanco, can keep the phone running for up to three days. The company says that tiny t1 can be used as a backup phone, and with a price of only $47, they may have a winner here.

 

Synaptics' in-display fingerprint sensor is ready for mass production

Synaptics, one of the biggest touch, display and biometrics manufacturers in the world, has announced that its in-display fingerprint sensor is now available. This is great news for phone manufacturers, which have tried to minimize the size of the front display bezels by moving the fingerprint sensors to the back side of their smartphones.

According to Synaptics, its new Clear ID FS9500 sensor works with both standard and curved OLED displays and has a size of only 0.059 inches. The fingerprint sensor works fine even in bright sunlight and continues to do its job properly even if people's fingers are dry, cold and/or wet.

The company's Clear ID system is 200% faster than standard 3D facial recognition technologies and requires a single touch to access the smartphone. That's a huge plus, considering the fact that most people tend to check their phones about 50 times per day.

 

Samsung starts producing 512 GB flash storage chips

The South Korean corporation has started to produce a new generation of embedded universal flash storage chips, increasing memory size from 256 GB to 512 GB. This means that smartphone owners could soon benefit from twice as much storage space for their photos, videos, apps, etc. According to Samsung, people can store about 22 hours of 4K video on their new 512 GB card.

The new eUFS chip utilizes 64 layers of V-NAND chips, which are coordinated by a dedicated controller. They are faster than the previous generation, reaching speeds of 860 MB/s and 255 MB/s when reading and writing data.

The chip that manages power consumption has been improved as well, so your smartphone's battery level shouldn't be affected. Since the new memory contains 100% more cells, it could have used 100% more energy, so this is a remarkable feature indeed.