how mobile is accelerating hardware innovation

The recent hardware revival has poured a lot of ink.
Pebble smartwatch raised more than $10 m in 30 days, more than 10 times its fundraising target, Ouya launched a $99 game console, Nest recently surpassed2bn.
At Hipmob, we work with several companies at the forefront of mobile hardware, and we see three big trends accelerating this revival;
Display, cloud and merchandising of sensor components.
Smartphones have become a problem with input and display, and the hardware design has long been plagued by the needs of some kind of display.
Display provides feedback indicating your correct use of the device (or not).
So in addition to making powerful devices, the manufacturer has to make some sort of Monitor, which greatly increases the cost.
This leads to a lot of trade-offs.
In the design of daily necessities (1988)
\"Donald Norman wrote. .
If you are not careful with the selection \"you may end up with a VCR, which brings fear and disgust whenever you try to change the channel reset or set it up to record the show you are not on.
It doesn\'t take much checking to find out the cause of the difficulty: no visual feedback.
As a result, the user (1)
It is difficult to remember their position in the required steps; (2)
Remember that there are difficulties in what needs to be done next; and (3)
It is not easy to check the information just entered to see if it is expected and if they think it is wrong, it cannot be easily changed.
In the execution process
First two questions)
In the evaluation
Last question)
It means a lot to these video recorders.
Both can be bridged by using the display.
The smartphone solves two problems of input and display.
Now, manufacturers of hardware/wearable devices are no longer building large and complex displays, but are satisfied with small displays (or none at all)
And send data to nearby pre-via wifi or Bluetooth wireless-
A certified smartphone or tablet.
This is most obvious in wearable computing (
Inappropriate wearable device
Home automation (
Lockitron).
But the trend is spreading to other countries.
The same is true of consumer use cases.
For example, Senic is developing a laser distance meter that uses a mobile device as input and display.
These devices depend on the display in each user\'s pocket.
By giving up the cost of building a monitor in a device, the hardware can be smaller, lighter, faster, and cheaper (
Can be passed to buyer)
Manufacturers can therefore iterate faster.
Senic uses a smartphone as an input display for heavy lifting in a smartphone or cloud \". .
More and more affordable cloud computing allows us to uninstall some of the power consumption processing that must be done in our devices to the cloud.
So we can provide users with something more insightful and interesting than the actual sensor itself \"--Jeff Holove -
Phones, CEO of basic science, brings computing power and persistent bandwidth to cloud computing servers, and computing power is infinitely enhanced.
This means terminal equipment is very stupid.
All they really have to do is measure these measurements and transfer them to a smartphone.
The smartphone can handle not only the display, but also any computing.
In machine learning cases such as Nest, heavy work is usually handed over to the server, and Nest is designed to optimize your home temperature according to your habits.
Merchandising of sensors;
Smaller, faster, cheaper and more reliable \". .
Recently, in the past two years, the sensor has become very small, affordable and available, and can now be put into a small shape with a reasonable battery life. Jeff Holove -
CEO, basic science since the release of the iPhone, the wide use of sensors, such as GPS, accelerometer, gyro, proximity sensors and other sensors in mobile devices, has brought economies of scale to sensor manufacturers, this was impossible before (
Do you need to make billions of proximity sensors in addition to the iphone and Android phones? ).
As sensors become cheaper, they are more likely to appear in more devices.
This means that even if the manufacturer of the device that does not need the display (
The benefits of an inappropriate wearable device or the Myo of Thalmic Labs are lower prices, higher sensitivity, and higher sensor reliability.
The Basis smartwatch has 5 sensors, and with that in mind, Apple is meeting with the FDA on potential mobile medical applications to do a lot of computing in cloudIn, the staffing of medical sensor specialists heralds the high cost of a health sensor like a pulse oximeter.
So far, most of the sensor ranges included in mobile devices support consumer use cases-
Better navigation through GPS, through games like accelerometer and gyro.
If rumors can be believed, the next wave may include more (
More invasive)
Sensors from pulse oximeter to blood chemical monitoring equipment.
If this trend continues, you can expect to embed more sensors in smaller and smaller devices, from consumer hardware to dedicated tools (
For medical professionals, the construction industry, etc.
The potential impact cannot be underestimated.