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5 Features I Wish My Smartphone Had!

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Technology has evolved at a mind numbing pace. Evolution of smartphones is the biggest proof that most of have experienced at a personal level. Now, when you think about the future of smartphones in 2019, you’ll think about foldable screens, 5G, augmented reality, etc. But I believe that some features should already have been there in our smartphones now, but because of certain factors they didn’t get on the priority of designers. It could be because of the challenging form constraints or just because they didn’t deliver the right ROI. Feasible or not, I would love if my smartphone had the following 5 features.

1. Extendable Screens

Imagine placing two or more phones with NFC together and immediately the content of the primary phone spreads across the available screens and the phones start working together like a giant phone screen.

 

2. Switchable Screen Privacy

Nobody likes prying eyes on their phone screen while on a subway, in office or even at home. To avoid this, there are multiple screen privacy films available in the market. These screens use polarization to restrict any angular light waves so that the screen is visible only to someone who is viewing it directly. But these filters considerably darkens the screen brightness.

I would love to see some sort of display hardware which offers electricity driven polarization. This would mean you can simply turn screen privacy feature on and off from phone settings. You can just turn the polarization on when you need privacy and work with the resultant darkened screen. When done, simply turn it off and go back to using your brilliantly lit screen.

3. Self Charging Phone

The struggle to improve battery performance to power the continuously more powerful devices is not new. Researchers are working to improve the battery capacity and performance for quite some time now.

I believe everyone would love phones which come with transparent solar panels integrated within screens, gyroscopes within the phone producing electricity from physical movement or any other form of real time energy capturing mechanisms that either extends the battery life or even completely remove the need to recharge a battery.

And looking at the recent developments in the industry in the form of independent phone cases or specialized screens, we can expect a true self charging phone in the coming future.

4. Self Balancing Phones

Everyone would relate to the struggle to find a book or pillow or just anything to keep your phone stay up while binging on a Netflix series or watching a movie on your phone while lying in your bed. Or maybe trying to watch a youtube video while having a quick meal. It’s really inconvenient to hold the phone for long periods of time. It’s true that you can opt for a mobile case with a built-in stand, but it’s definitely not an elegant solution.

I think it should be theoretically possible to incorporate the technology used in Segway scooters that help them keep an upright position within phones. Imagine just putting your phone on any surface at any angle of your choice and it stays that way. I know this one’s a real stretch, but just try to imagine the convenience and coolness of the feature.

5. Offline Lost Phone Tracking

Ever lost a phone? Or unfortunate enough for your phone to be stolen away from you? The first thing that the thief would do is to switch it off. The only way to track the phone would be to hope that the thief would switch it on and the phone would establish a connection.

But, sadly the thieves are usually not that naïve these days. They have found multiple ways to dispose-off phones with reported and blocked IMEI. It would be really helpful if there can be a way to trace and locate smartphones that have been switched off. Update: Apple has introduced some offline mode tracking. Hopefully, we’ll see it soon in android phones as well

Closing Notes

Please feel free to comment if you any other capabilities you’d like to see in your phone. Also, do share which of the above functionalities would you love to have in your phone.

GravityCharger: An Off-grid Mobile Charger

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While on a vacation, I was driving through a village in central India and stopped for a break at the local market. The most interesting thing that caught my eye was a cart with big batteries and close to a dozen mobile phones placed on it. It was strange to see this assortment in the middle of a local market, and I went to talk to the cart owner to know exactly what he was selling. Guess what the service was? He was not selling any product, he was selling electricity. Any customer can come and charge their phone and pay for every 15 minutes slot the phone gets charged.

Later I got to know these kind of setups can be found not only in Indian villages but in many other pockets of Asia and Africa. And the key reason that they exist is that there still many areas where people have access to smartphones and mobile signals but not to reliable electricity supply.

Internet access is one of the biggest factor that has positively impacted the lives of people across the globe. However, the people who can benefit the most from internet access, are having trouble to do so despite having the right tools just because of not being able to charge their phones.

I decided to come up with a product concept to solve the problem: “How to generate sufficient electricity to charge a phone, without relying on the grid, in a cheap and reliable manner?”

Evaluating existing options

The ideal product/solution should be:

  1. Inexpensive, as the target users are expected to have limited spending power
  2. Low to zero maintenance, as the users might be located in remote locations with limited access to service centers/spare parts
  3. Able to produce electricity reliably, with no dependence on external factors
  4. User friendly to ensure mass user adoption

A quick Google search revealed that there are a lot of alternatives available to provide off-grid lighting and power storage, but most of them fail to deliver on at least one of the factors mentioned above.

Gravity to the rescue

The challenges with the existing alternatives were not because of the product design, but because of the intrinsic properties of the the source of energy they were using. So, instead of designing a better product that relied on these sources of energy, I needed to find an alternative clean source of energy that is more reliable and freely available.

I realized that gravity scored well on all the evaluation factors. It is free, available everywhere and among the most consistent of all nature’s forces. If a product can be designed to somehow harness gravity in a convenient manner, we might have a solution to the problem.

Product Concept

The device could either utilize pulleys or gears to convert the downward force on weights raised to a height to turn a dynamo which in turn would produce electricity. As a user, I would just gather around some rocks or put sand in bags and place them on a pan or hang them from a hook and just start charging my phone. A rough concept diagram would look like this:

But there are certain design challenges that I have not covered. The feasibility of a production grade product would depend upon whether sufficient power to charge a phone (approx 5 W) can be produced with a manageable weight and a convenient reset cycle (lifting the weight again to restart the power supply). Also, once the balance has been achieved, the design would require multiple iterations so that the end product looks like a gadget in a household rather than an experiment in the middle of somebody’s home.

Closing Notes

Please comment if you would like to share your thoughts on the feasibility of such a device. Also, I would love to hear your ideas on what are some other ways in which gravity can be used for household applications.