“The 1958 Hiker” is a story about a hiker who lost his map. As he drifted off to sleep that night, a visitor from the year 2008 taunted him with revelations of the future. This article was previously posted to Google Knol. In the story of The 1958 Hiker, a lone hiker is making his [more...]
Apple’s iPhone 4 and Nokia’s N900 are both advanced mobile phones with web browsers and music players, yet they are very different products. Apple’s iPhone offers a streamlined but controlled user experience, while Nokia’s N900 is unconstrained and powerful but perhaps somewhat uneven and unrefined. For many purchasers their preference will depend on the included [more...]
When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 4, he made a big point about its display, which Apple calls the “retina display”. Jobs claimed that its 326 pixels per inch corresponds to the limit of perception of the human retina. When viewed about a foot away, Jobs said, you can no longer see the individual pixels. [more...]
A modern cellphone must of course include a cellular radio transmitter and receiver. But many feature-phones and smartphones contain other kinds of radio. A basic GSM phone such as the Nokia 3120 contains a cellular transceiver capable of operating on multiple frequency bands, three in this case: 850MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz. For maximum connectivity around [more...]
Cellphones and other personal electronic devices are sometimes equipped with touch screens, and there are two quite different kinds in common use. A resistive touchscreen has two thin layers of conductive but transparent film above the screen, and measures the change in resistance between the two layers due to the pressure of touch. A capacitive [more...]
Both children and adults can benefit from individualized therapies for stuttering. Children can be helped most effectively because their speech patterns are just being formed. However, treatments can help adults as well. It may take a bit more work because habitual patterns are already ingrained, but hard work can often pay off with positive changes. [more...]
Bluetooth is a versatile wireless standard which allows electronic devices to exchange data with other nearby devices. For two Bluetooth devices to work together, it’s not enough that they both contain a Bluetooth chip and antenna. They must also support the same Bluetooth profile, which defines how the data exchange takes place. The iPhone 3G [more...]
The biggest difference between the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G is that the iPhone 3G supports third generation phone networks, which can transfer data much faster. The fastest data transfer supported is 3.6Mbit/s HSDPA which, although not the maximum that HSDPA can support, is fast for mobile web browsing. 3G is supported on the [more...]