5 ms·
Phones are quite cheap already(~$140 for a pretty decent xiaomi). The largest share of price of a phone is the monthly bill. It's mostly due to monopolies, so
by petra 10y ago
Phones are quite cheap already(~$140 for a pretty decent xiaomi). The largest share of price of a phone is the monthly bill. It's mostly due to monopolies, so even though there's some news technologies that promise 25x-50x reduction in costs[1] with some of those already availble, it's hard to tell whether consumers will see that.
Another place where the smartphone could help with costs: currently great noise cancelling earphones are very expensive($300) .And in general are well loved by those who can afford them.
but what happens if we remove most of the hardware(cheap) and compute($0 on phone) to the phone ? And create place in the app store for noise-cancelling apps ?
[1]http://5gwnews.com/index.php/90-r/670-wireless-abundance-is-here-what-gig-lte-massive-mimo-mmwave-and-more-can-mean http://5gwnews.com/index.php/90-r/670-wireless-abundance-is-...
- throwanem 10y agoIt stops working, because the latency is too high for the inverse-phase signal to match up with the unwanted incident signal it's intended to cancel.
- petra 10y agoYou could have a low latency digital processor in the phone/soc. At that level, digital is cheap. Of course the other part is that high-frequnecy noise is hard to cancel. But still Bose does a great job.
- nradov 10y agoThe cell phone carrier market is the classic example of a "confusopoly" where the dominant market players make it as hard as possible for consumers to make fully informed decisions. None of the carriers actually has a monopoly outside of a few isolated areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly Acoustics make it impossible to do good noise cancellation using just an app. You really need a specialized microphone mounted directly on the headphones.
- petra 10y agoSure you need a high quality microphone on the earphone - but that's men's , could be very cheap in volume. And the rest is something interface chip on the phone, and than some digital logic which is cheap.