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Well that's disappointing. Adding gimmicky(imo) sensors and removing functional/useful sensors. Obviously Samsung is thinking from a consumer prospective, but
by jug6ernaut 13y ago
Well 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y agoAre there any papers on the topic of including this new data written by actual meteorologists?
- cryptoz 13y agoYes, there are quite a few relevant papers. Here's a preliminary study from 2006 regarding weather forecasting using surface pressure measurements on the synoptic scale: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175 A number of papers have been published since as that work has continued. So we know that surface pressure data is useful on a large scale; is it useful on a micro- or mesoscale? A few researchers are actively writing and publishing papers on this topic. Cliff Mass at the University of Washington, along with his colleagues and students, are leading the charge. https://ams.confex.com/ams/94Annual/webprogram/Paper236282.html https://ams.confex.com/ams/94Annual/webprogram/Paper236282.h...
- MBCook 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y agoIt would have more to do with the temperature of the CPU and/or battery than anything dealing with the outside temperature.
- arrrg 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago+1 - mostly it's good for checking I still have a body temperature.
- taiki 13y 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.)