# Are smartphones a waste of potential? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 30, 2014, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smartphones-a-waste-of-potential/694422 "2014-07-30T15:31:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smartphones-a-waste-of-potential/694422/21 "2014-08-03T13:09:51Z")
I wish our iPhones were way more powerful just the day before yesterday. We were effectively lost, because the car GPS didn’t consider our next destination to be in the city our reference said it was in (this probably happens to 5% or 10% of our destinations for some reason). So I tried Siri, and she was just plain unavailable. As I understand, Siri recognizes speech by sending a recording of what I say to some central computer, which sends back an interpretation. No cell reception, no Siri. This is because there’s not enough local computing power to do speech recognition. At least, this is what I think I read a couple years ago. The GPS part of the phone was working fine, and we needed navigation by speech while driving, but the CPU power (and perhaps memory space) was insufficient. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smartphones-a-waste-of-potential/694422/22 "2014-08-03T19:09:14Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > You know it’s already possible to hook up a monitor and full-sized keyboard to a smartphone, right? Of course I do – I use a (fold-up) Bluetooth keyboard myself with my phone occasionally. But I still don’t think that makes a compelling reason for most people to put a full capacity computer into their phone, which they most likely will rarely use for full capacity tasks away from a desk. Not to mention that, if my phone and computer are the same device, and I lose my phone (or it gets stolen) then I’ve also lost my computer. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smartphones-a-waste-of-potential/694422/23 "2014-08-03T20:19:15Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Really? I just opened a tab on mine, and it took a half second at most. And I have an early Vista computer, so it is relatively underpowered today. I had a lot of tabs open, which may have been interfering slightly. Also, the SMDB servers have always had a sluggish response time for me. At any rate, 1/2 second is still very slow IMHO. I want the page to be displayed on the next monitor refresh. The speed of light starts to be a problem here… > [@Voyager](#): > > Starting up clocks too quickly does terrible things to your signals. Switching on power too quickly does terrible things also. Indeed; I’ve been in a position where power transients were improperly handled on the HW side, and we had to avoid certain ways (in SW) of driving the HW to avoid these. Ugly. Still–this stuff happens on more like a nanosecond timescale. Ramping up the clocks over the course of, say, 100 microseconds would have been fine. You would want a dedicated HW unit to handle this, of course. > [@Voyager](#): > > Thermal mass? Please point me to this, because the heat sinks on the parts I work on are truly impressive. Mobile processors don’t get to use heat sinks. They have heat sinks, just small ones. Suppose you have a 100 watt processor that you want to run at full speed for 1 ms out of every 100. That’s a 1% duty cycle and 1 W average, so clearly average power isn’t a problem. The thermal pulse is also only 0.1 joules–a 0.5 gram piece of copper foil would have its temperature raised less than a degree per pulse. Even a 10 ms pulse would not be an issue. I’ve also heard talk of using phase-change materials in heat sinks, which have a much higher heat capacity than copper and the like. You could handle a much longer thermal pulse with a gram or so of that stuff, though it wouldn’t do anything for the average. Synthesized diamond would also help greatly, since it’s the best thermal conductor we know of (at ordinary temperatures). Maybe someday (hey, smartphones have synthesized sapphire pieces already, so it’s not that far-fetched). > [@Voyager](#): > > In any case, it would be better if we could convince the sellers to get rid of the crapware. As if that’s ever going to happen. For a while, Microsoft had a program where they offered discounts to laptop makers if they didn’t add a bunch of crapware. I have a Vizio laptop that did this. It was rather nice. ---
**Author:** ![boffking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/858c86/32.png) [@boffking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/boffking)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2014, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smartphones-a-waste-of-potential/694422/24 "2014-08-04T02:44:24Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > The question is whether people _ever_ use their smartphones’ full processing power. Exactly. Just like you could use your 200-HP 5 seat car to take your family or friends on a trip through the mountains if you wanted to. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-smartphones-a-waste-of-potential/694422.md?page=1)