Despite recent smartphones packing 7‑10 kWh batteries thanks to silicon‑carbon anodes, they still require daily charging because high‑resolution screens, power‑hungry chips, 5G radios, and background apps have dramatically increased overall power consumption.
Geekbench scores show the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max delivering a 15% single‑core and 22% multi‑core CPU boost plus a 41% GPU performance jump compared with the iPhone 16 Pro, while the new models also feature up to 12 GB of RAM and improved thermal design.
This article explores the concept of modular smartphones, recounting personal fantasies of mixing hardware, detailing Google's Project Ara prototype, and highlighting FairPhone's sustainable, repair‑friendly designs that let users swap components, extend device life, and challenge conventional mobile manufacturing.
Apple plans to remove the physical SIM slot from certain iPhone 14 models in favor of eSIM, citing space savings, design simplification, and future-proofing, while highlighting security concerns, the impact on Chinese consumers, and the broader implications for the smartphone industry.
Edge deep learning inference on mobile devices faces hardware and software fragmentation, diverse CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and NPUs, and limited programmability; optimization techniques such as model selection, quantization, and architecture‑specific tuning enable real‑time performance, with most inference on CPUs, GPUs offering 5–10× speedups, and co‑processor support varying across Android and iOS.
