Curved Smartphone Screen

How could a curved smartphone screen be an improvement on a flat one? What struck me first was that ambient light would reflect less on a curved screen. Display experts confirm my suspicion, but say there seem to be more advantages. According to iphonehacks.com a curved screen substantially improves screen readability, image contrast, color accuracy, and overall picture quality, but can also increase the running time on battery, because you can do with less battery-draining screen brightness. Here's a picture of Samsung Galaxy Round:

A curved screen improves privacy, since it's less readable from the wrong angle. One disadvantage I can think of is that you'll no longer be able to use it as a mirror, because it will change your looks.

Perhaps a screen with variable curvature would be better. For that you would need a slightly flexible screen. That would keep the advantages of the flat screen and add the curved screen ones.

I think smartphone technology is going to develop very much in the coming years. Speakers have come down in size lately and I expect that small size will be used inside smartphones soon. My iPhone and iPad already have reasonably good sound quality without anything attached, like earphones or external speakers. In a few years that's going to be a lot better.

I read recently that the average smartphone user picks up his smartphone about 150 times a day. That amounts to about ten times/hour. Don't know if it's really been researched properly, but it seems credible. Whatever truth in that, I'm in no doubt that the smartphone is the most popular invention in the last 20 years, or even longer. Its great popularity indicates it's going to develop strongly in the coming years.

References: 
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/11/curved-displays-smartphones-gimmick.html
http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_Round_ShootOut_1.htm

My Mavericks has arrived!

My MacBook now has Apple's new OS called OSX Mavericks. 5.29 Gigabytes all for free and it took about 3 hours to download. I upgraded from OSX Lion, which means I skipped the Mountain Lion upgrade.

Upgrading is nerve-wracking, particularly if you come from the world of Windows. (Got a touch of deja-vu there. Guess I must've said just that before.) In that world you could always count on the PC becoming slower after updating. In fact that also happened when I upgraded the MacBook to OSX Lion, but I fixed that by doubling the RAM memory to 4GB. OSX Mavericks doesn't slow down at all, much to my relief. 

The new OSX has some nice new features of course. Perhaps my favorite is tabs in the Finder application. I used to end up with a number of Finder views. From now on I can do with just one, because you can copy between tabs. Great! Another Finder feature is colored tags. I'll probably use that sparely. I'm comfortable with just using directories, but I might use tags for a few things.

iBooks on the PC, and not just on iPhone and iPad and iPod touch, is a good idea. Being able to download straight to the PC makes sense. My PC is still my computing hub. Ok slightly old-fashioned to favor a MacBook over iPad, but PCs still are more versatile than iPads, and they don't run away as easily, connected as they are to USB disks, speakers and the rest.

Apple also says Mavericks makes applications go easier on the battery and the same with Safari. That's great news and I'm sure I'll benefit from that sometimes. 

For the next OSX I would like to see an improvement in the performance of the Dashboard, where I have a calculator, a clock and a dictionary. It seems to enter a sleep mode after PC startup, and even after a long time of non-use. It takes a few seconds before I can use the calculator and that's a bit annoying. But maybe I've just missed a trick. If so I can correct it myself sometime.