iPhone Envy May Have Felled Galaxy Note7

Samsung's desire to match the iPhone 7 Plus led it to implement an aggressive design and manufacturing approach that led to problems with its Galaxy Note7 -- including some instances of the smartphones bursting into flames -- and eventually its global recall, Instrumental reported last week.

Instrumental engineers tore down a Galaxy Note7, and found "evidence in the design of an intellectual tension between safety and pushing the boundaries," CEO Anna Shedletsky revealed.

Samsung engineers "designed out all of the margin in the thickness of the battery," she noted.

It "sits within a CNC-machined pocket -- a costly choice likely made to protect it from being poked by other internal components," Shedletsky speculated.

"For something that is innovative and new, you design the best tests that you can think of, and validate that the design is OK through that testing," she said.

However, battery testing "takes a notoriously long time, and thousands of batteries need to be tested to get significant results," Shedletsky pointed out. "It's possible that Samsung's innovative battery manufacturing process was changing throughout development, and that the newest versions of the batteries weren't tested with he same rigor as the first samples."

If the Note7 had not been recalled, "a few years down the road these phones would be slowly pushed apart by mechanical battery swell," she added.

A rule of thumb is to leave 10 percent of the depth of the battery pocket as a ceiling above the battery to allow for that expansion, but "our two-month-old unit had no ceiling," said Shedletsky, and "since it breaks such a basic rule, it must have been intentional."

The Long Road to Adequate Testing

It's "impossible to test for everything," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

"You have to consider not only testing the battery but also testing applications and the phone," he told TechNewsWorld.

Considering how many versions of the Galaxy smartphone Samsung has released and the number of units produced, "this is like comparing the Galaxy Note7 problem to air travel," McGregor remarked. "While crashes make the headlines, air travel is still one of the safest forms of transportation."

Considering the Bigger Picture

Limitations in battery technology and increasing demands for new displays, wireless interconnects, sensors and processors in ever-shrinking sizes, the industry is "pushing these technologies to the breaking point," McGregor said.

That will be a problem for all handsets and for wearables in the future, he predicted.

The IEEE has "known for some time that there were several fundamental limiting factors to personal electronics," observed Michael Jude, a program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

They include "power dissipation, power consumption, and power density -- how much juice you can store in a small package," he told TechNewsWorld.

Battery technology is tricky, Jude said. "A battery is really a controlled chemical explosion. You can have a little power over a long period of time or a lot all at once. Smartphone designers walk a fine line between power consumption and battery storage density."

Torvalds Releases Hefty Linux Kernel Update

Linus Torvalds this weekend announced Linux 4.9, which offers a number of significant upgrades to the kernel.

"I'm pretty sure this is the biggest release we've ever had, at least in terms of commits," Torvalds wrote. "If you look at the number of lines changed, we've had bigger releases in the past but they've tended to be due to specific issues."

A chunk of the upgrade is the new greybus staging support, and other than size, the release looks fairly normal, he noted. Staging, GPU and networking are the bulk of the drivers.

Version 4.2 got a lot of lines from the AMD GPU register definition files, Torvalds noted. Version 3.2 was due to staging, version 3.7 was due to the automated uapi header file disintegration.

Final Weeks

The merge window for 4.10 is now open, Torvalds said, adding that the timing might be a bit awkward as it technically closes on Christmas Day.

That is a "pure technicality," though, and he said he would stop pulling on the 23rd of December at the latest -- adding that if he should get roped into Christmas food prep, even the Dec. 23rd date might be called into question.

"I could extend the merge window rather than cut it short, but I'm not going to," Torvalds said.

"I suspect we all want a nice calm winter break, so if your stuff isn't ready to be merged early, the solution is just not merge it yet at all and wait for 4.11," he suggested.

"The release is a fairly standard update with some improvements in file system, security and hardware support, including ARM devices and GPUs," noted Jay Lyman, a senior research analyst at 451 Research.

"The size and weight of Linux 4.9 may be an issue for some developers and end users, particularly as containers and lightweight container-specific operating systems -- many of which are based on Linux -- gain more attention and use," he told LinuxInsider.

Kernel Tune-up

Overall, the new Linux kernel represents "a lot of performance tuning and streamlining," said Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

Despite its size, it's not a hugely significant upgrade, he said, but it reflects a maturing kernel that addresses a wide range of markets.

"The biggest single feature that stood out to me is virtual display and reset support for AMD GPUs," Teich told LinuxInsider. "This is a big deal for folks who want to use AMD GPUs for compute acceleration, or even to deliver virtual desktops from Linux servers."

There are a lot more updates for 29 more AMD SoCs, including a wave of 64-bit ARM mobile and embedded SoCs, he noted.

"Google's canned project Ara's 'greybus' got some time," Teich said, "and some of that might show up in a future Moto phone."

Intel got fixes for its integrated sensor hub, DRM, and some performance improvements for Atom, he also noted.

Lastly, a few MIPS, POWER and SPARC architecture commits also were snuck in, showing just how strong Android and Linux have become, said Teich. "It's not just about x86 vs. ARM. 

Microsoft and Intel's Project Evo Ups the PC Game

Microsoft and Intel on Wednesday announced Project Evo, their highly anticipated collaboration to create the next generation of personal computers. The project aims to expand on new advances in artificial intelligence, mixed reality, advanced security and gaming,

Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft, unveiled some of Project Evo's ambitious plans at the Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) event in Shenzhen, China.

Through the collaboration, the companies will push the boundaries of a personal computer's capabilities in the near future, he said. Technologies under development include far-field speech and wake-on-voice enabled through Cortana, biometrics and voice authentication in Windows Hello, spacial audio, and HDR support for gaming.

Project Evo -- particularly its expanded use of Cortana -- invites comparisons to the digital assistant tools found in Amazon Echo and Google Home, standalone speakers that use Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant respectively. Though their capabilities differ, each uses voice communications to interact with the automated home.

However, Project Evo seems geared toward making the personal computer into a much more sophisticated device -- one that can be accessed and operated in ways never before seen.

Home Hub Connection?

Essentially, users will be able to wake up a PC, whether it's open or shut, simply by saying "Hello Cortana." Through voice commands, users will be able to access the information they need either directly from their personal computing device or from the cloud.

"This is going to make the PC way more intuitive than it is today," Intel SVP Navin Shenoy, general manager of the Client Computing Group, told WinHEC attendees. "You no longer need to be directly in front of your PC to activate Cortana."

"There are certainly aspects of Project Evo that are likely to compete directly with Amazon Alexa and Google Home," noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

However, it's likely that "Intel and Microsoft are after a fundamentally bigger game," he told TechNewsWorld.

In the case of Project Evo, the companies are working with much more powerful computing capabilities than Amazon and Google are using with their home hubs.

"Microsoft has the technology in the cloud, not the home," noted Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

"The problem is that the PC is not the center of the home or the consumer experience," he told TechNewsWorld.

While there is room for improving the PC experience, this project is not going to push Microsoft into a direct competition with Amazon, McGregor said.

Passwords Passe

The Project Evo collaboration will provide advanced security to the PC, including biometric authentication using Windows Hello, eliminating the requirement to memorize multiple passwords, Shenoy said.

A major aspect of the collaboration is to provide mixed reality experiences in PCs that are affordable to the average consumer, and also to use head-mounted displays that blend the physical and virtual world in ways not seen before.

Microsoft has submitted its HoloLens to the Chinese government for approval, Myerson announced at WinHEC, and the company expects to make the devices available to developers and commercial customers during the first half of 2017.

New Reality

Together with Intel, Microsoft also shared specifications for PCs that can support headsets capable of mixed reality. New head-mounted displays from Acer, Asus, Dell, HMD and Lenovo are expected in 2017. 3Glasses, the leading HMD hardware developer in China, will make its Blubur S1 headset ready for Windows 10 by the first half of 2017, reaching more than 5 million active monthly customers in that market.