If you’re going to design for mobile, then it’s a good idea to have a grasp of what makes up the modern smartphone in terms of hardware and software. You can then start to think about the possibilities these offer when creating user experiences. The better you know the device, the more you can exploit its capabilities within your products.
Typically there have been four general screen sizes that responsive design has been aimed at: the widescreen desktop monitor, the smaller desktop (or laptop), the tablet and the mobile phone. As you can see in the examples below, as the screen gets smaller, the content shifts and changes to the best display for each screen. The Apple iPhone has transformed the mobile industrial design ethos. The front display screen is now at the centre of the design of a mobile smartphone. A lot of Internet content, particularly videos, look better when the mobile is held in a landscape view. Thus the picture aspect ratio now defines the necessary width of the smartphone.
Dec 30, 2020 A new Motorola flagship phone is in the works. The device has a centred punch-hole camera. The renders show a curved body design hinting at a flagship phone. Instead of creating a normal-sized phone, like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, that opens to reveal a tablet-sized screen, Motorola is blending retro design to highlight an alternative direction.
Author/Copyright holder: Maurizio Pesce. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
The smartphone has gone from nowhere, in a few short years, to become the world’s most popular Internet access device. Developing mobile apps and mobile websites has become a huge opportunity market because of this but what do we need to consider in terms of the device itself when making design decisions for mobile?
The anatomy of a smartphone comes in two parts; the hardware and the software.
The Software
There are two operating systems that dominate the mobile landscape: Android and iOS. However, there are other operating systems to consider as well.
Android
Founded by Andy Rubin and supported by Google and drawing the backing of many of the major hardware and software developers in the smartphone sphere; Android has gone from strength-to-strength since it was conceived on October 2003. It is the world’s leading smartphone operating system and has been dominant since late 2010.
iOS
Apple’s operating system was, for a considerable period of time, the leading smartphone operating system. It is unsurprising that it should be in 2nd place in terms of market penetration today. Apple does not license its operating system to other hardware providers nor does Apple operate in the budget sector of the smartphone market. While it may be second in terms of market penetration – there’s no doubt that the average iOS user spends more money on apps than the average Android user.
Windows
Windows may be the dominant operating system on the desktop but it’s a bit of an “also ran” on the smartphone. There are fewer apps available for this operating system and it tends to be a tertiary consideration (if it is considered at all) for most developers.
Blackberry
Blackberry was once the dominant force in corporate handset provision. Poor management decisions led to Blackberry suffering a huge dip in market share after smartphones launched. The operating system continues to exist and support millions of subscribers – however the company launched their first Android operating system handset in November 2015 and the future looks dim for Blackberry. It is unlikely that developers will focus on Blackberry without an overwhelming business driver for doing so.
Author/Copyright holder: Kārlis Dambrāns. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Firefox OS
Firefox’s open source OS was launched back in February 2012. While there are a few commercial handsets running Firefox OS at this moment it’s not a primary consideration for most developers.
Sailfish OS
Sailfish is based on Linux and Mer and has a unique programmable UI in the form of Jolla (a multi-tasking interface). It is a project from MeeGo (consisting mainly of ex-Nokia employees) and is yet to achieve any significant commercial uptake.
Hardware
A smartphone is, at heart, a miniature computer and thus it shares many similar components with computers – such as processors and memory. These components are constantly upgraded in new generations of phones and it’s important to consider how to balance the demands you place on this hardware. If you take advantage of latest generation technology; you rule out many existing smartphone owners from using your product. Go back too far in generations and you risk releasing a product which isn’t as powerful as your competitor’s.
However, in this section we want to look at smartphone specific hardware options that are commonly found in smartphones that are not commonly found in desktop/laptop computing. These are the hardware items that designers will want to consider taking advantage of when developing smartphone user experiences.
Touchscreens
The touchscreen interface has developed rapidly over the last decade. There are two main variables to consider when designing for touchscreens:
Mobile Phones Wikipedia
The sensitivity to touch – resistive screens are made of two layers of conductive material with a gap between them to serve as resistance. They are not as responsive as a capacitive touchscreen, which uses a layer of glass with a conductor over it that senses a break in the electric field when a finger comes into touch with it. There is also the haptic screen which provides tactile feedback to the user when they touch the glass. The Super AMOLED (Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen includes touch sensors on the display and is a further improvement in both performance and thickness of screen.
The quality of resolution – TFT (Thin Film Transistor) screens offer reasonable resolution but are power intensive, IPS-LCD (In Place Switching Liquid Crystal Displays) offer improvements in both resolution and power consumption (the Retina screen is an IPS-LCD). Then there are OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) and AMOLED (Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screens to consider too both of which offer advantages over LCD.
Author/Copyright holder: Bin im Garten. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0
GPS (Global Positioning System)
GPS chipsets are found in most mid-range and high-end smartphones. They enable, with varying degrees of accuracy, the handset to pinpoint where on earth the smartphone is located.
Designers will need to consider location based services for certain products. GPS allows them to automate much of the grunt work for this.
Accelerometer
Not all phones contain an accelerometer but many do. An accelerometer measures the speed of movement of the device and the direction in which the device is moving.
This enables the pedometer function common in many health apps as well as other more ingenious uses of motion data.
Camera
Nearly all smartphones come with on-board cameras today. These vary in terms of their quality in both resolution and availability (front and/or back mounted cameras) and can be used as input devices.
Heartrate Monitors
Many phones come with a heart rate monitor now and those looking to create mobile health apps will want to tap into this functionality.
Author/Copyright holder: haste. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use.
Fingerprint Sensors
High-end smartphones often incorporate finger print scanners and finger print recognition technology. While this can be a useful security measure – over-reliance on finger prints can become a barrier to user acceptance.
The Take Away
Smartphones offer a different experience to desktops and laptops not just because they are smaller but also because they are markedly different from both a hardware and software perspective. The smart designers will look to take advantage of these differences to create memorable user experiences.
References & Where to Learn More
Course: Mobile User Experience (UX) Design:
https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/mobile-user-experience-design
For a history of smartphones and the issues that are faced by designers through smartphone development check out this wiki page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Mobile_operating_systems
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Jon Fingas. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-ND 2.0
Cellular / Mobile Telecommunications Basics Includes:
What is cellular communicationsConcept of cellular systemMultiple access techniquesDuplex techniquesWhat's inside a cellphoneHandoverBackhaul
The mobile phone or cell phone as it is often called is equally important to the network in the operation of the complete cellular telecommunications network. Despite the huge numbers that are made, they still cost a significant amount to manufacture, discounts being offered to users as incentives to use a particular network. Their cost is a reflection of the complexity of the mobile phone electronics. They comprise several different areas of electronics, from radio frequency (RF) to signal processing, and general processing.
The design of a cell phone is particularly challenging. They need to offer high levels of performance, while being able to fit into a very small space, and in addition tot his the electronics circuitry needs to consume very little power so that the life between charges can be maintained.
Mobile phone contents
Mobile phones contain a large amount of circuitry, each of which is carefully designed to optimise its performance. The cell phone comprises analogue electronics as well as digital circuits ranging from processors to display and keypad electronics. A mobile phone typically consists of a single board, but within this there are a number of distinct functional areas, but designed to integrate to become a complete mobile phone:
- Radio frequency - receiver and transmitter
- Digital signal processing
- Analogue / digital conversion
- Control processor
- SIM or USIM card
- Power control and battery
Radio frequency elements
The radio frequency section of the mobile phone is one of the crucial areas of the cell phone design. This area of the mobile phone contains all the transmitter and receiver circuits. Normally direct conversion techniques are generally used in the design for the mobile phone receiver.
The signal output from the receiver is applied to what is termed an IQ demodulator. Here the data in the form of 'In-phase' and 'Quadrature' components is applied to the IQ demodulator and the raw data extracted for further processing by the phone.
On the transmit side one of the key elements of the circuit design is to keep the battery consumption to a minimum. For GSM this is not too much of a problem. The modulation used is Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying. This form of signal does not incorporate amplitude variations and accordingly it does not need linear amplifiers. This is a distinct advantage because non linear RF amplifiers are more efficient than linear RF amplifiers.
Unfortunately EDGE uses eight point phase shift keying (8PSK) and this requires a linear RF amplifier. As linear amplifiers consume considerably more current this is a distinct disadvantage. To overcome this problem the design for the mobile phone is organised so that phase information is added to the signal at an early stage of the transmitter chain, and the amplitude information is added at the final amplifier.
Analogue to Digital Conversion
Another crucial area of any mobile phone design is the circuitry that converts the signals between analogue and digital formats that are used in different areas. The radio frequency sections of the design use analogue techniques, whereas the processing is all digital.
The digital / analogue conversion circuitry enables the voice to be converted either from analogue or to digital a digital format for the send path, but also between digital and analogue for the receive path. It also provides functions such as providing analogue voltages to steer the VCO in the synthesizer as well as monitoring of the battery voltage, especially during charging. It also provides the conversion for the audio signals to and from the microphone and earpiece so that they can interface with the digital signal processing functions.
Another function that may sometimes be included in this area of the mobile phone design or within the DSP is that of the voice codecs. As the voice data needs to be compressed to enable it to be contained within the maximum allowable data rate, the signal needs to be digitally compressed. This is undertaken using what is termed a codec.
There are a number of codec schemes that can be used, all of which are generally supported by the base stations. The first one to be used in GSM was known as LPC-RPE (Linear Prediction Coding - Regular Pulse Excitation). However another scheme known as AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) is now widely used as it enables the data rate to be further reduced when conditions permit without impairing the speech quality too much. By reducing the speech data rate, further capacity is freed up on the network.
Digital Signal Processing
The DSP components of the mobile phone design undertake all the signal processing. Processes such as the radio frequency filtering and signal conditioning at the lower frequencies are undertaken by this circuitry. In addition to this, equalisation and correction for multipath effects is undertaken in this area of the design.
Although these processors are traditionally current hungry, the current processors enable the signal processing to be undertaken in a far more power effective manner than if analogue circuits are used.
Control processor
The control processor is at the heart of the design of the phone. It controls all the processes occurring in the phone from the MMI (Man machine interface) which monitors the keypad presses and arranging for the information to be displayed on the screen. It also looks after all the other elements of the MMI including all the menus that can be found on the phone.
Another function of the control processor is to manage the interface with the mobile network base station. The software required for this is known as the protocol stack and it enables the phone to register, make and receive calls, terminate them and also handle the handovers that are needed when the phone moves from one cell to the next. Additionally the software formats the data to be transmitted into the correct format with error correction codes included. Accordingly the load on this processor can be quite high, especially when there are interactions with the network.
The protocols used to interact with the network are becoming increasingly complicated with the progression from 2G to 3G. Along with the increasing number of handset applications the load on the processor is increasing. To combat this, the design for this area of the phone circuitry often uses ARM processors. This enables high levels of processing to be achieved for relatively low levels of current drain.
A further application handled by this area of the design of the mobile phone is the monitoring the state pf the battery and control of the charging. In view of the sophisticated monitoring and control required to ensure that the battery is properly charged and the user can be informed about the level of charge left, this is an important area of the design.
Battery
Battery design and technology has moved on considerably in the last few years. This has enabled mobile phones to operate for much longer. Initially nickel cadmium cells were used, but these migrated to nickel-metal-hydride cells and then to lithium ion cells. With phones becoming smaller and requiring to operate for longer from a single charge, the capacity of the battery is very important, and all the time the performance of these cells is being improved.
Although mobile phones are one of the most commonplace pieces of electronics equipment these days, they are nevertheless complicated inside. An understanding of the mobile phone basics can often be useful when looking at the way a cellular network and cellular technology in general works.
In-system Design Mobile Phones Verizon
Wireless & Wired Connectivity Topics:
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