5 ms·
The Galaxy S5 does not have temperature or humidity sensors
- jug6ernaut 12y agoWell that's disappointing. Adding gimmicky(imo) sensors and removing functional/useful sensors. Obviously Samsung is thinking from a consumer prospective, but still very disappointing.
- funkyy 12y ago"Obviously Samsung is thinking from a consumer prospective, but still very disappointing." Wait, what? Samsung is trying to make majority of customers happy and that's disappointing? This is what you are saying?
- jug6ernaut 12y agoDid you miss the "gimmicky" part? Samsung is thinking from the customer perspective in that they are usually brought in by flashy "new" features. But that doesn't mean that these features actually pan out into anything useful.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI guess "consumer perspective" means "optimizing short-term amount of money extracted from customers for value given" instead of "providing the most awesome product we can and reaping benefits a little bit later".
- lkbm 12y agoWhen you give developers more tools, they surprise you with what they come up with. Consumers didn't say they wanted accelerometers, but once developers got ahold of them, they proved massively useful. If you give me a new sensor, I might not have any ideas on how to make it useful, but if one developer has one good idea, that benefits me.
- cryptoz 12y agoExactly correct! Google and Motorola put a barometer into the Xoom to test GPS altitude improvements, and it turned out that some developers (like me, and like the opensignal team) discovered that the sensor actually has world-changing potential in atmosphere modelling. Huge benefit from a simple sensor addition that didn't even really have a clear purpose at launch.
- dysfunction 12y agoBut then that goes back to funkyy's point: there may be lots of unexpected things developers can do with it, but none of them so far are things customers care about. Atmospheric modeling? Really cool! Do customers care? Heck no.
- cryptoz 12y agoThey'll care when they get very high accuracy weather forecasts! New models will result in more accurate, more personalized and relevant forecasts that I think customers will love. This is a very tough problem that nobody has cracked yet, but it looks promising in the near future. We'll see.
- bcohen5055 12y agoBut there is still the question of value proposition to the consumer. Is the incrimental marginal cost of including the sensor low enough that the improvements in weather forcasting will be demananded by consumers? I dont believe the target demographic of samsung is swayed towards their products by an additional 5 even 10 degrees of weather accuracy. But i have no data to back this up.
- justin66 12y agoAre there any papers on the topic of including this new data written by actual meteorologists?
- 12y ago
- MBCook 12y ago> and removing functional/useful sensors. Are temperature and humidity really that useful? I know many Android phones have had them, but have they really be used? Do they really add much to the device?
- jug6ernaut 12y agoto the individual they did not pose much benefit, but to society as a whole they were extremely useful. Through programs like pressureNET, literally opening up new avenues for data recording that never existed before. In the short term these new sensors will provide more benefits to the consumer, but to the majority they will be something you use 1 or 2 times then forget about.
- Crito 12y agoTemperature would be extremely useful... if not for the fact that I typically store my cellphone millimeters away from my body. If temperature were useful, then humidity would be as well because then you could calculate local humidex.
- nathanm412 12y agoIt would have more to do with the temperature of the CPU and/or battery than anything dealing with the outside temperature.
- arrrg 12y agoWhy? My phone tends to be warm because of body heat most of the time. Yeah, the shell can sometimes get warm under load, but that’s the exception. I would guess that if not for body heat and with the right placement a temperature sensor could get useful data. However, with the phone nearly always being transported so close to the body I really don’t see it being useful.
- scottcha 12y agoI believe temperature sensors are required to get barometric data to altitude[1]. That's why all altimeter watches also have temperature though its usually useless while wearing since its reading the temp of your wrist instead of the air. On a second note I produce an app (http://www.ullrlabs.com http://www.ullrlabs.com) for avalanche danger evaluation and knowing your ambient air temperature is one factor which is helpful in that process. Though I haven't yet tried to read that value on android phones for the app. [1]See pressure altimeter calibration equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altimeter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altimeter
- mikeash 12y agoTemperature and humidity seem gimmicky to me (I don't care about atmospheric conditions in my pocket) while fingerprint and heart rate are at least potentially useful.
- ewoodrich 12y agoI've never found a phone temp sensor to be useful, primarily because it tends to be several degrees higher than ambient due to internal components.
- revscat 12y agoI believe that monitoring internal components is exactly why temperature sensors are useful: the device can shut itself off it it becomes too hot. This can happen if the it has been left on the dashboard of a car during the summer, for example. This can help to lengthen the lifetime of the device.
- nimrody 12y agoAll cellphones (even very old ones) have some sort of temperature sensor. This is required for dealing with components that are sensitive to heat (oscillators for example). These are usually not accessible to applications since they (by design) do not report the ambient room temperature.
- diminoten 12y agoI don't think those sensors are taken out, I think this is with regard to the outside temperature/humidity sensor. Internal component temperature measurement isn't something you can get rid of, it's critical to the phone.
- hmpc 12y agoThis is indeed a common use case for temperature sensors in embedded devices, and I very much doubt there isn't one in the S5. Temperature sensors are included in pretty much all inertial sensor dies nowadays, both for offset/drift calibration and thermal shutdown protection. It's more likely that Samsung simply removed application-level access, although I don't know why they would do so.
- davidgerard 12y ago+1 - mostly it's good for checking I still have a body temperature.
- taiki 12y agoThinking from a consumer perspective, the temperature and humidity sensors aren't really useful. It's a phone, not a weather station. I think though, this gets to the heart of the problem with Samsung. They throw a lot of shit at the wall with no care for design or even how the thing is supposed to be lived with. (FWIW, I think LG, Nokia and HTC are doing decent work in mobile.)
- funkyy 12y agoThe best tl;dr ever!
- geetee 12y agoIt's most likely due to the water-proofing. The S4 rugged version has the same limitation.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- __mp 12y agoI talked to an engineer from Sensirion (the makers of the temperature sensor on the S4) a couple of weeks ago. He told me that the waterproofing was the reason that they couldn't include their sensor in the S5.
- receese 12y agoThe S5 barometer apparently survives underwater... I see no reason why a temperature/humidity sensor can't be engineered to.
- JamesCRR 12y agoConflicting information, I just talked with someone from Sensirion who was quite central to the the SHTC1 project, he confirmed it was NOT the waterproofing that was the issue and pointed out there are Japanese devices with the same chip that are waterproof, even to IP68 (2m depth).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- return0 12y agoMakes sense, after all temp sensors don't really belong to phones. What't the point of knowing it's 35C and the humidity of your pocket? They 'd make sense in cars, once (if ever) they get connected.
- privong 12y agoWeather signal [0] has developed algorithms to correct the internal sensor measurements for things like this, particularly temperature. So it's not entirely useless. [0] http://weathersignal.com/ http://weathersignal.com/
- runeks 12y agoAllow me to be skeptical about the reliability of this algorithm. How can you ever know the temperature of the air outside by measuring the temperature of your pocket? Sure, there's a correlation, to some degree. But what if you wear different pants, or put the phone in your bag? I just don't see how that's possible (to a meaningful degree of precision). I would think data from weather stations would be a lot more reliable, and make the temperature sensor obsolete.
- piyush_soni 12y agoWouldn't I know when I'd do that? For example, civilization has known for decades now how does a thermometer work. It will show correct body temperature only at a few places. If we can somehow isolate the sensor to not to read its own machine temperature but read the ambient temperature, I think it'll be a big thing.
- privong 12y agoIt presumably relies on having multiple phones recording the temperature, averaging out person-to-person variations in attire (thickness of pants, etc.). If those variations are correlated among people for a given day (everyone is wearing thicker pants), it's probably colder, and that would have to be included in the algorithm.
- return0 12y ago
- Artemis2 12y agoI love how developers of this app allow themselves to collect numerous data about their users' phones, so much they even track their hardware, model numbers and available APIs. But the worst thing is probably that this has became so common that people don't react negatively anymore towards that kind of privacy violation.
- pkaye 12y agoThe whole point of that API is crowd source collection of data so everyone can benefit.
- aw3c2 12y agoSadly they are selling to the devil: http://opensignal.com/insights/ http://opensignal.com/insights/
- cleis 12y agoThe data included in OpenSignal insights is aggregated both geographically and temporally at a resolution that makes it impossible to identify any individual user. All we show are averaged stats over a monthly or quarterly period for a given area. Part of our project is to inform users about how carriers are performing, but also to inform carriers how they're performing so that they can improve their service for their users. We use our data to independently regulate the carrier market, from both the supply and demand sides as we think this is the best way to help effect much-needed improvement. We sell to operators so that we don't have to charge consumers or show them annoying in-app ads!
- mrjatx 12y agoWhy do I care that a mobile developer knows my device model and hardware specs? I'd prefer you to know for bug testing and performance metrics.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- hiphopyo 12y agoWhat other cool sensors do mobile phones have these days?
- dublinben 12y agoMany phones also have magnetic compasses, so you can get an accurate bearing without needing GPS signals. I would expect significant advances in inertial navigation systems in mobile devices in the coming years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system