By Carl Bagh: Subscribe to Carl's RSS feed
September 3, 2010 2:39 PM EDT
Smartphones are stealing the thunder from laptops, as they become capable of offering similar user experience as a laptop.
Transitioning of the power of a laptop to the palm is leading to the demise of the erstwhile companion, as revealed by a glut of Android-based, iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm smartphones.
How can a pigmy mimic a giant?
However, as smartphones and laptops converge one cannot but question as to how a rich array of complex features like touch screen capabilities, voice recognition features, synchronization of documents and contacts, the adoption of augmented reality applications etc. can be handled with the limited processing power, gaps in internal memory, battery life and screen real-estate in a palm-held device.
Basically this results in a mismatch between the magnitude of features offered and the availability of limited support systems that run these features.
Uploading complex features on a laptop is viable due the extensive support available in terms of the hardware like processing power, RAM, battery life etc.
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An Apple iPhone 4 uses A4 800 MHz processor while a Dell laptop Precision M6500 uses an Intel Core 2.GHz.. An iPhone uses 512MB RAM while Dell Precision uses 4x2 GB RAM. Basically a laptop is powerful by order of physics as it has more space to accommodate the essential hardware compared to a palm size smartphone.
The low power constraints of smartphones have been behind the recent Apple-Adobe feud. Apple states that iPhone cannot support Adobe as decoding Adobe Flash videos consumes more battery life.
The answer is in the cloud
Yet the smartphone industry continues to grow and is able to trump a laptop in terms of features and applications and the key element which makes this possible is cloud-computing.
The capacity of a smartphone has increased through cloud-computing. The cloud allows the creation of virtual smartphone images in the mobile cloud and to customize each image to perform specific tasks. Running applications remotely allows the smartphones to use the power installed in a data center and removes the limitations of the processing-power, memory, and battery-life limits of a physical smartphone.
It uses a server program, client program and communication program to make it possible. The client program resides in the physical smartphone device and the server program resides in each virtual image in the cloud. The client program uses a communications protocol to interact with the server programs.
Through virtualization a server is divided into multiple environments thus allowing a guest to have a dedicated piece of the server. A virtual machine monitor or hypervisior is placed over the server to validate instructions given by the user. The instructions or applications are stored in the virtual smartphone images.
Thus when an application icon is triggered on a smartphone the client program sends the instruction through the communication protocol to the virtual smartphone image or guest which is then processed on the assigned virtualized server.
The premise behind the cloud is that the applications reside remotely and are processed remotely over the cloud using the processing abilities of the data center rather than the smartphone.
This allows the smartphone makers to assign more complex tasks to the cloud while adding other value-added features to the smartphone.
Based on this model smartphones will continue to evolve and become more powerful devices as the processing and storage features continue to migrate to the cloud.
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