There are reports that smartphones that bend may hit the shelves early next year. Smartphone maker Samsung is preparing to release two such devices next year, hoping to be the front runner of an emerging trend in smartphone technology.
One of Samsung’s bendy phones would fold in half, like we have seen before in foldable phones, only this time the aim is to increase the screen size to that of a tablet. The other would have a 5-inch screen that could roll out into an 8-inch display. Both devices would use organic light-emitting diodes to create a thin, plastic screen that can bend without breaking.
The bendable smartphone based on graphene technology.
Source: Moxi Group
Moxi Group, a China-based tech startup company, has plans to put a bendable phone on sale this year, in an effort to beat Samsung to the bendable phone, according to Bloomberg.
Moxi’s devices may be less sophisticated than the big Tech Samsung’s devices (they’ll have a black-and-white display), they do have an ability to roll up into a bracelet that’s worn on the wrist, neat indeed.
With the growing popularity of wearable devices, a phone that rolls up into a digital bracelet seems like a logical next step.
In May this year, Samsung showcased a prototype of a smartphone that bend to show off at a tech conference in San Francisco:
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Dropping your smartphone when taking a selfie could soon be in the “no problem” basket
Corning® Gorilla® Glass 5 raises the bar for protection against drops higher than ever, surviving 1.6-meter drops onto rough surfaces up to 80% of the time. Plus, even though it’s their toughest cover glass yet, it still delivers the optical clarity, damage resistance, and touch sensitivity Gorilla® Glass is famous for.
They launched their next generation of Gorilla Glass – the material used in more than 70% of smartphone screens, including on Samsung and Apple devices.
According to a recent global study*, over 85% of smartphone owners have dropped their phones at least once per year and 55% have dropped their phones three times or more. Additionally, more than 60% of smartphone owners reported dropping their devices between shoulder and waist height.
“With each successive generation of Corning Gorilla Glass, we have taken cover glass technology to new levels. Gorilla Glass 5 is no exception, extending Corning’s advantage in drop performance over competitive glasses,” said John Bayne, vice president and general manager, Corning Gorilla Glass. “With many real-world drops occurring from between waist and shoulder height, we knew improving drop performance would be an important and necessary advancement.”
Saving on repairs
Shattered or cracked screens are the number one cause of smartphone repairs and customer complaints globally.
The new glass was tested on rough surfaces – a demo for journalists showed dummy phones being dropped from a height of 1.6 meters onto a sheet of sandpaper.
Some of the phones tested survived over 20 hard drops in the lab! This is giving you and me a lot more second chances. I sure have dropped my phone many times, and will probably drop it in future too. Typically, most phone drops are from between waist and shoulder height.
As well as drops, the company said it was twice at good at resisting scratches and other damage compared to what’s currently on the market.
Device manufacturers are expected to unveil products with the new glass within the next few months.
Corning Glass has a vast interest in this product for obvious reasons. The company demonstrated the drop test to reporters at its lab in Palo Alto, California recently.
However, the company warned it had no control over eventual smartphone designs, meaning some models could be slightly weaker depending on the manufacture and design of the device. Corning’s statistics were based instead on controlled lab conditions. Testing outside the lab was not permitted.
Corning’s work in specialist glass dates back to 1879, when it produced the glass used in the iconic Edison lightbulb. By 2016, more than 4.5 billion devices use Gorilla Glass, which is created using a technique known as fusion forming. It involves placing the raw materials – sand and “other inorganic material” – into a melting pot.
Mobile phones sure has come a long way, and if you are after a business solution for your mobile fleet, give Key Technologies a call.
Key Technologies helps small and medium Brisbane businesses take back control of their business services, improving accessibility, lowering overheads and refocusing your teams efforts back into building your business rather than investing time and effort (that you don’t have) into facilitating services required to do business.
CONNECT PRESENT AND FUTURE WITH INNOVATIVE, FLEXIBLE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS THAT GROW WITH YOUR BUSINESS
PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange, which is a private telephone network used within a company. Users of the PBX phone systems share a number of outside lines for making external phone calls.
Panasonicphone systems combine the advantages of traditional telecommunications with the convergence of IP technology, offering maximum feature and functional flexibility to handle all of customers’ business communication needs, both today and in the future.
The Panasonic Smart Hybrid PBX allows businesses to grow and adapt their communication needs as their business expands.
With complete flexibility you can configure your communication needs to suit your business workforce, with digital and IP handsets as well as full mobility solutions for your mobile workforce.
The Panasonic KX-NS700 is not only flexible but also cost effective, ideal for all business types. We will delve into more detail about the features of this new system in a future post.
The new Panasonic PABX KX-NS700 phone system
Need a connected strategy for your business?
Talk to us about your needs on 1300 755 615
Have a quick question about integrating your business communications? Add in the comments box below and we’ll answer it. To stay up to date with the latest articles connect with us directly on LinkedIn and Google+.
READ SPEEDS FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN THE BEST MICROSD CARDS
The release of the UFS memory card is here. They come after microSD cards for removable storage.
UFS. Universal Flash Storage.
Samsung Electronics has just unveiled the industry’s first Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory card that is designed to greatly improve user experiences, especially in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback.
The company announced the world’s first removable UFS (Universal Flash Storage) memory cards, offering storage capacity of either 32, 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes, and performance speeds that simply blow older formats out of the water.
The UFS cards have sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second – five times faster than the best microSD cards. That means reading a 5 gigabyte, full HD movie in roughly 10 seconds, says Samsung, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which manages the same feat in around 50 seconds.
Write speeds are also significantly improved, with rates of up to 170 MB/s. That’s nearly double the performance of the very fastest microSDs (this SanDisk Extreme Pro card, for example, has write speeds of up to 100 MB/s), but seven or eight times faster than the cards recommended to non-professionals.
Samsung says all this power is necessary to keep up with the abundance of high-resolution footage being generated by devices from smartphones to action cams, drones to 360-degree cameras. But while the new UFS standard has appeared as embedded memory in a few devices (notably Samsung’s own Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge), there are no products that yet support the cards as removable storage. We wonder if this is going to become a feature in new phones?
And while the design of the cards looks similar from the front, as you can see from the photo above, the pin configuration on the back is non-compatible. Price and availability have also yet to be announced for the range, so while UFS might be the cleartechnological successor to formats used in microSD cards, the roadmap for how it actually gets into consumers’ hands is less clear.
Still, if any tech company is going to be first to support removable UFS cards, it’s likely to be Samsung. Keep your fingers crossed for the next Galaxy smartphones.
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Google has officially announced that Android N is no longer Android N: it’s Android Nougat! released on June 30th, 2016.
The next trick is going to get people to actually pronounce “nougat” correctly.
Here’s all the official Android nicknames for their Operating Systems we could find:
Cupcake: Android 1.5
Donut: Android 1.6
Eclair: Android 2.0-2.1
Froyo: Android 2.2
Gingerbread: Android 2.3.3 – 2.3.7
Ice Cream Sandwich: Android 4.0.3 – 4.0.4
Jelly Bean: Android 4.1 to 4.3
KitKat: Android 4.4r
Lollipop: Android 5.0 – 5.1
Marshmallow: Android 6.0
Nougat: Android 7
They do keep it sweet – we think it works for them as it will always be easy to remember and a theme OS is like a themed party, much more interesting.
Thanks Android for keeping it simple and sweet!
Get ready for Android Nougat
Google Assistant
The new Assistant software will let you engage in more natural back-and-forth dialogue with the Android device than you can with Now (Google’s current digital and search assistant), in order to get things done, like research a restaurant and make a reservation.
Instant Apps
Timed with the release of Nougat but also available on phones running OS versions as old as Android Jelly Bean, Instant Apps lets you access or use certain apps without having to download and install said apps. This is especially useful for digital payment transactions, where you can pay with Android Pay instead of whatever system the app would have made you use. Again, Android gives you the choice.
Multiwindow
Looking at two apps at once will become standard on Android phones and tablets. With multiwindow, you can see apps in a split screen. This feature has been available on Samsung and LG phones for a few years, and now it’ll come to many more Android devices. It’s also very similar to what the Apple iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 4 and iPad Pro can do, thanks to Apple’s latest OS, iOS 9.
Notifications, night mode, System UI Tuner, and data
One of the most easily distinguishable changes to Android Nougat can be seen in the quick access notification bar and the notification drawer. You can edit the tiles that are visible and choose the ones that you use most often. For example, if you never use the Hotspot tile, just tap the Edit button on the bottom right of the drawer, press and hold the tile and drag it off. You can do the same thing to the other tiles to rearrange their position, and the idea is for developers to make quick access tiles to trigger actions for their own apps – you’ll be able to control them. This is what we love about Android, the control you as a user have over your phone, and not the other way around.
Android Nougat is all about more control — that means changing how your status bar looks.
The status bar is the area you see at the top when in any screen and it displays the icons of your notifications and other important details like your battery status, Wi-Fi and data connection, the time, and more. Android Nougat lets you customize this bar via the System UI Tuner. Simply pull down the notification drawer and tap and hold the gear icon on the top right. After a few seconds, System UI Tuner will be unlocked, and you’ll be able to access it at the bottom of your Settings menu. When you’re in the Tuner, tap on Status Bar and you’ll be treated to numerous toggles for things like Auto-rotate screen, Hotspot, and Volume. Tap each individual setting to remove or place them in your status bar. Don’t want anything but notifications in your status bar? You can do that too.
Battery and time have more customization options — you can choose to always show the percentage of battery you have left, show the percentage when charging, or remove the battery indicator entirely. For time, you can hide it, show the hours, minutes, and seconds, or just show the hours and minutes.
You can set a priority level for every notification that appears on your device. To do this, swipe the notification a little to the right or to the left — don’t let it disappear. You should see a gear icon appear, tap it and you’ll see Importance with a specific level attached.
There are six levels: Level 0 blocks all notifications from an app; Level 1 prevents full-screen interruption and never vibrates or makes a sound; Level 5 always allows full-screen interruption and appears at the top of the notification list; and so on.
So you can swipe the bar all the way to the left for Level 0, and all the way to the right for Level 5 – it all depends on what the app is and how you want to see notifications from it. You can also find these controls and more by heading to Settings > Notifications.
Have a limited data plan?Google wants to help conserve some of the data apps use with a new Data Saver tool baked into Android Nougat. Head over to Settings > Data usage > Data Saver to turn the feature on or off. When you turn it on, it will tell you how many apps are allowed to use unrestricted data when Data Saver is on.
Data Saver essentially limits apps from sending or receiving data when in the background — it doesn’t completely stop them from accessing data, but these apps will do so less frequently. If you’re particularly close to hitting your data limit, this tool could prove useful. You can tap on Unrestricted data access to toggle which apps you don’t want Data Saver to restrict.
Split-Screen, Display Size, Emergency Info & Sharing
Split-screen is one of the core features of the new Android version, and it’s long overdue. Similar multi-tasking features have long been present in smartphones made by LG and Samsung, but Android Nougat is finally baking it into the operating system. To trigger the mode, simply go into an app and press and hold the Recent apps button – better known as the square on the navigation bar. The app you were in will move up to fit the top half of the screen, and you’ll be greeted with a few recently-used apps to set what goes below.
You can move the middle bar to control how much space each app uses, and if you swipe it all the way to the bottom, you’ll exit Split-screen mode and the top app will take over. If you go the other way, the bottom app will stay open. It’s a handy way to work between two specific apps, and you can even drag text between the two.
Rather than pressing and holding the Recent apps button, you can also swipe up on it in an app to launch Split-screen mode. You may need to turn this on in the System UI Tuner > Other.
In Android Nougat, you can also quickly cycle through the two most recent apps you’re using. So if you just left the Dialer app, and are currently on the SMS app – double tap the Recent apps button to quickly switch back.
Change the DPI
Smartphones come in all shapes and sizes these days, and Android N lets you change the display size to your liking. Head over to Settings > Display > Display Size to change the size of all the elements on the screen – not just the fonts. You can go from small to default, large, larger, and largest. It’s a great way to change how your screen looks, whether you needed things to be a little bigger to see them better, or if you are a developer and want to test your app on different display sizes.
Key Technologies helps small and medium Brisbane businesses take back control of their business services, improving accessibility, lowering overheads and refocusing your teams efforts back into building your business rather than investing time and effort (that you don’t have) into facilitating services required to do business.
Panasonic 
Here’s all the official Android nicknames for their Operating Systems we could find: