Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority now we often talk about the exterior of our smartphone maybe we talk about the design language we might talk about the materials the texture how it feels in the hand and so on but have you ever wondered about the inside of your smartphone what's going on on the inside what are all those different components and what do they do well if you've ever wondered please let me explain so probably the most obvious component of your smartphone is its display although it has an outward facing surface that we use to interact with the smartphone it is actually an internal component of the smartphone now display technologies today and smartphones come in two main types those based on LCDs and those based on LEDs and the from that we get the IPS technology and we get AMOLED or Super AMOLED technology now the difference between the two is it on an LCD based display basically those a back light that is shining through some polarisers it's showing through some filters and by manipulating the crystal display we can get different colors coming through on the other side now that means it actually the light is not being generated by the display itself is being generated by this light behind the display and then only some of the light is coming through on to the other side now with an AMOLED display actually the LED bit LEDs light emitting diodes so each of the pixels are made up of these little light emitting diode LEDs that produce probably red green and blue as actually display itself that's generating the different colors now the advantage of an AMOLED display over an LCD display is that when a pixel is off initially showing black it is actually not using any electricity because it's actually black it's switched off that means you get power saving also means you get great black very deep blackening means you get a good contrast whereas with an LCD when something is black what actually happening is the crystal display is being manipulated so that none of the light gets through but the light itself is still being generated in the backlight behind it so there's no saving advantages out at all and next up is the battery now the batteries come in two main types either those that can be changed user removable batteries you pee off the back you can take the back drag and put another one in all those that are sealed inside your mobile phone now battery today mainly use a lithium ion technology which means you don't have to worry about that kind of memory effect we had many many years ago about how you charge your phone and have a charge in discharge and so on we don't have those problems today however the size of the battery is an important factor and the average today seems to be about 3000 milliamp hours for a 5.5 inch kind of device now once you go deep inside your smart phones the biggest most important component is the system on a chip now the system on a chip is not just a CPU the central processing unit it's actually a whole bunch of different bits of silicon that are all put together to give you a highly functional system on a chip so you've got the CPU you've got the GPU you've got l1 and l2 caches you've got a display processor you've got a video processor you've got a DSP there's a whole bunch of things that go in there but make this system on a chip now it comes to CPU today all basically all smartphones use the system architecture from arm so arm work by licensing their intellectual property their designs to other people and they incorporate them inside of their chip so you might heard of things like the cortex a53 the cortex a57 the cortex a 72 equals a temp diseases are all arm designed CPU cores that companies like Qualcomm and Samsung and Huawei and media take all put inside of their system on chips there is actually a second category of arm type processes which are those companies are owned and architectural license from arm which means they have the right to design their own CPU calls as long as they are compatible with the arm instruction set and Cole chrome has one of those licenses so does Apple interesting enough so does Samsung as oh chips like the cryo call that you find in the cold core eight 2821 were proprietary design chips by qualcomm using an armed architectural license and next up is the GPU there are three main players you've got qualcomm with the Adreno GPU is we've got armed with their Mali GPU and you've got your imagination with their power the our GPUs imagination really aren't that popular as arm and Qualcomm you find them occasionally Paul Cortona mediatek chip you might find them in a samsung chip occasionally but mainly there you find them in Apple's processors where as Qualcomm all of their Snapdragon processors have the Adreno GPU net and basically chips from Samsung and from MediaTek and from while they all have GPUs from arm in them now once you have this powerful CPU GPU combination there are still a few more blocks that you need to really get that full multimedia experience on your smartphone one of them is a display processor actually the interface between what's coming out of the GPU and CPU and your LCD or LED display and then you also have a video processor when you're watching YouTube when you're watching Netflix all that data is coming down compressed mp4 for example and it needs to be decode now it can be decoded in software but it's much better if it's decoded in hardware and that's the video processor but it also does any coding so if you're using a video chat application you're talking to somebody what's being captured on the camera needs to be encoded so it can be sent up into the Internet and then on to the other person again the video processor that in hardware and they're all included on the system on a chip now no system can run without memory and without storage so when we talk about memory we'll talk about random access memory RAM and a typical Android 7 base smartphone will have about 2 gigabytes of RAM as a minimum and then we might have 4 gigabytes as pretty usual there are some now with 6 and let's talk about some coming with 8 so that's random access memory it comes in two types you've got lpddr3 and lpddr4 the LP bit being low power where it reduces the voltage compared to what you get on the desktop and obviously lpddr4 is faster than lpddr3 and then there is internal storage that the amount of storage space you've got for the Android operating system for your apps and for all your multimedia 8 gigabytes kind of exists in some low-end phones 16 gigabytes is really the kind of the minimum practical minimum and then of course you've got 32 64 and so on after that one question of course is that do you really get 8 16 or so 2 gigabytes of space no you don't because Android itself takes up a fair portion of that space so if you've got an 8 gigabyte so you may only get 3 or 4 gigabytes of free space on it if you've got a 32 gigabytes though you may find that even as much as 7 or 8 gigabytes is taken over by androids or things like the operation itself and for over-the-air updates and other things like that so you're not always going to get the full amount that's written on the box and of course smartphones are still phone so somewhere in the inside of your smartphone there needs to be some connectivity options cellular options and today of course we talk about 2g 3G and 4G LTE and to talk to those networks as failing networks your phone needs a modem and all of the major SOC builders have their own modem so Qualcomm have got their range of modems Samsung have while they have and mediatek have now the top three Samsung Qualcomm and Huawei basically are pretty equal with each other Qualcomm is probably always in the lead just a little bit but you hear you talk about the most advanced LTE modems you can get on the market and mediatek because it aims for a different category of phones they tend to have still support for what 4G LTE but much slower category of modems they're not advancing as quick as the other ones but that's not so bad because remember you might have a smart phone that supports absolutely latest and greatest LTE standards but if your own network at your home country doesn't support them then it really doesn't make any difference because mediatek are going for that different segment market other connectivity of course options beyond LTE are called Bluetooth Wi-Fi and NFC and they'll be chip inside of your phone but specifically work for those things and they tend to be built by companies like Broadcom and in XP so if you hear those names there the people are doing the connectivity chips in your phone and then of course we come to the camera now most phones nowadays have a front-facing camera and a rear-facing camera inside that camera you're going to find three different components there's a sensor which actually detects the light there's the lenses that you that light comes through and then there's the image processor now obviously we know about megapixel count we've been talking about that for years I've got an 8 megapixel camera or a 16 megapixel camera but megapixel count isn't the only thing that's going on here the really the sensitivity of the sensor is incredibly important and how much noise it generates in low-light situations is also important and once the light has entered through the lens and it hits the sensor that data needs to be processed to create you a photograph particularly when we're talking about things like filters and the different except you can add and we're talking about HDR photography there is a piece of hardware called the image signal processor which basically takes the data from the camera sensor and it creates the JPEG files that we actually have which are our actual photos and all of these major SOC s have image since image processors built into the SOC so it can do that stuff like HDR and the other image color corrector and other image processing like that of course we also use our smartphones for audio whether it's just it having a conversation with somebody whether it is listening to music whether it's watching a YouTube video audio is an important part and there are several different components to the audio system in your mobile phone of course there's the speaker's themselves sometimes we have rear speakers I've seen a foam in the side speaker often they're on the bottom or edge of a smartphone of course there are the front-facing speakers which generally today I'll consider to be the best because you can get on a phone but the speaker's aren't the only thing that you need you also need a DSP a digital signal processor which will do things like the equalization processing for the audio that's coming out of your mobile phone anomie to a decade digital to analog converter and that takes the digital signals the ones and the zeroes in turns it into an analog signal but can power a speaker or go down your headphones in to your into your ears and that obviously again you get different quality Dax some are more noisy some are higher quality and that and some MOT smartphone manufacturers make a big deal about the DAC they put inside their phones and then lastly a few more features are mentioned you've got a GPS chip somewhere your phone that's kind of useful the location services detecting the satellite signals that works out where it is on the planet you've actually got a tiny little vibrator motor so that when you your phone vibrates when you've got it on silence maybe that little motor in there actually does that there's of course support which you use for charging and for data transfer that I would be a micro USB port or a USB type-c port and of course there's the headphone jack which you might not get on some phones nowadays but hopefully you do also have a headphone jack otherwise you're just relying on bluetooth only for connecting to your audio equipment my name's Gary Sims from Andhra thority I we hope you enjoyed this video 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