Anyone who has once owned a RAZR knows the 800 milliseconds of hell that exists between pushing “contacts” and actually seeing the menu come up. Such a simple operation is no longer a great tax on the processors of our phones, but of course we expect a great deal more these days than just a list of recent calls. With all our demands, we are still gladdened when a manufacturer gives the phone enough power for snappy transitions and speedy website rendering. Case in point, for all its praise, the Pre doesn’t do anything fantastically new, it just does things fantastically fast, be it through an elegant interface or its beefy OMAP processor.
Similarly so, one of the death knells of the Blackberry Storm was its wonky and slow OS that layed a touchscreen over its OS like a cheap paint job. The question is: What’s the future? Are we going to see speed comparisons flatten out as manufacturers and engineers catch up with each other?
More importantly, what can we do about speed? Nobody here is about to revolutionize 65 nanometer CPU architecture, but how can we design around and for this problem? How about heatsinking the CPU off the back of the aluminum case and overclocking the processors we already use? (comically illustrated below)
The phone above is obviously absurd, but it hopefully illustrates a point. Alternately, should we forego the glossy, translucent buttons that look oh so pretty but take oh so longer to render? Lets see some comments and suggestions as to how industrial or interface design could sate our thirst for a snappy, snappy phone and whether it can be done while maintaining the high standards of beauty we’ve come to expect.
February 3, 2009 at 2:40 am
That’s a tough thing to overcome from a physical standpoint. realistically, the only real solution is to up the thickness and cram more power into the processor.
maybe have an optional expansion that fits on the back and speeds things up for power users.
February 4, 2009 at 2:05 pm
From a graphic designer standpoint, i’d say that the beauty and usability of an interface is not in its shiny buttons, or flashy colors. Some historical achievements in graphic are by no means related to color or fashion, they’re due to proportions or brilliant typography.
Unfortunately, for industrial designers, i don’t think flashy graphics (when they’re programmed well, that is) have anything to do with sluggish performance. Most of the time, they’re just an extra layer on top of a sluggish OS.
That said, i’d really like to see how a phone with a minimalistic but usable interface, and good font rendering preferably, would fare compared to a shiny UI layer in terms of speed…
When it comes to heat sinking the processor, why not use the natural heatsink created by the keyboard holes and surfaces to make it more efficient? While avoiding fingerburns and melted buttons, of course…
February 6, 2009 at 3:29 am
Speed is undoubtedly important but so is battery life and design. I think a faster phone is better than a thiner phone although doing so would likely lower initial appeal.
However, when it comes to battery life, if over clocking is done it cannot successfully be done at the cost of an already very limited battery supply.
In my opinion, the newer processors should offer sufficient power without needing to resort to these sacrifices.
February 6, 2009 at 6:42 pm
First of all I think the optional expansion is a horrible idea. I’ve never liked them, because they’re usually obtrusive and you have to pay more to get the most out of a device.
There are many things that affect the speed at which a device operates. The most important being processor speed, RAM, and the OS. Finding the most economically suitable threshold for all three of these to begin would be the smart idea. As with any processor, the more powerful it is, the more energy it needs, the hotter it gets, the more energy it needs. You don’t need ‘the best’. Simply look into those phone OS’s that you liked for simplicity over robustness. Multiple applications running at once or in the background cloud any device’s performance. The operating systems that effectively put irrelevant open applications on the backburner, if not closed at all would give the device the snap, thinking about one thing at a time, like concentrating on your math homework and not watching TV. This is probably all common knowledge, and i’m not exactly involved in phone manufacturing, but I do use phones, and i know when they aren’t working at their full potential.