Last week, being in between classes, I decided to enjoy a moment of leisure in our faculty lounge. Here you can find colleagues, who in no time engage you in quiet urbane conversations (sometimes serious discussions), and all in a peaceful, well-mannered setting.
Then along came the cell phone. With the gadget in their ear, the well-mannered professors show their dark sides: some shout, others Flash Memory Drive growl, many curse, and worst of all, the faculty lounge turns into mayhem, pandemonium, and chaos all at once. So I headed toward the staff-faculty cafeteria where one find kindred souls with whom to chat, swap stories, or maybe engage in low-level-non-vicious gossip. Right in the middle of ordering my lunch, the waitress’s cell phone rings. Of course, she takes a moment to answer. Never mind that I had to listen to her problems about getting rid of her free-loading sister Memory Card -in-law. As I returned home on the Q32 bus, and once on the 59th Street Bridge, the bus started to move at snail pace: ten minutes per each square foot. As if in a chorus the passengers pulled their mobile phone and started notifying their alleged-loved ones that they would be late due to heavy traffic. After this initial choreographed wave, a second one ensued. Incoming calls started. One conversation caught my attention; a young man is begging his father to pay the last installment of his tuition bill: “It’s only seven hundred dollars, dad.” “I know you gave me the $700 bucks. But I used it for the tattoo you see on my neck.” “I agree I should tattoo things on my brain rather than on my neck, but this tattoo is my soul and it will stay with me forever.” “You Cell Phones /Mobiles know I’ll pay you back when I graduate.” “A check is fine. Okay, dad. I promise–no more tattoos. Thanks, man. Love you dad.” As I debarked from the bus, I turned around to thank the driver, but I changed my mind since the man had the darn garget plugged in to his left ear. At least, the good soul had the common sense not to use it while driving.Posts Tagged ‘ Flash Memory Drive’
The story on cell phone
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010The performance on TV phone
Sunday, April 11th, 2010Just like your home TV, a retail TV phone has the equipment to extract the audio and video Cell Phones /Mobiles content from radio signals and process them to display a TV show on its screen. The concept is not earth-shattering, but delivering TV signals within a mobile framework poses some challenges. For one thing, streaming video requires fast transmission speeds. Previous “2G” GSM networks provided data-delivery speeds of 10 to 14 kilobits per second (Kbps), and “2.5G” networks offered 30 to 100 Kbps. At 10 Kbps Flash Memory Drive , a TV show is really a slide show; and at 100 Kbps, it’s pretty choppy. There’s also the bandwidth issue. Television data takes up a lot more space than voice data, and delivering live TV to thousands of cell phones simultaneously can slow a network to a crawl. Finally, receiving, processing and displaying video content requires battery power, and cell phones don’t have much juice to spare.
But technology advances are beginning to make cheap TV phones a viable luxury. Fast “3G” networks (which provide broadband Internet access to cell phones and other mobile devices) provide data-transfer rates of 144 Kbps to 2 megabits per second (Mbps). 3G multicasting technology saves bandwidth by allowing multiple subscribers to access a single broadcast stream (as opposed to uncasing, which is a one-to-one transmission). And companies are Cell Phones /Mobiles implementing power-saving transmission techniques like time slicing, which transmits data in spaced intervals so the receiver can turn off in between transmissions.While you can subscribe to a TV service plan right now (such as MobiTV, Sprint TV or Smart Video) if you have the right phone, the standards for mobile TV broadcast and delivery methods are still in their infancy. In the next section, we’ll take a look at the primary methods of mobile TV distribution. TV phones are the way of the future, but click here see how telephones have evolved over time.