Your phone is already obsolete

Ice Cube's listening to a phone as useless as yours.

Work on the iPhone 5 already underway

Frank Elechi
Contributor

Users of Internet- and multimedia-enabled smart phones, such as the iPhone, may soon witness another upgrade of the technology.

Two of the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers, Apple and Nokia, are racing to develop new technologies in order to attract customers.

A new patent from Apple suggests that touch sensors, like those in the iPhone's touchscreen, can improve sound quality during a call. The sensors would automatically boost or lower the speaker volume depending on how closely the phone is help to the ear.

Apple engineer Shaohi Chen proposes using an array of touch sensors "dispersed around the earpiece region" of a phone to take a touch-sensed "imprint" of the user's ear.

Apple’s touchscreen phones already have a simple sensor near the ear to disable the phone's keypad when the device is pressed against the head – although some users of the iPhone 4, released earlier this year, have reported problems with this feature. Chen says his idea would simply require an array of such sensors arranged in grids so the phone can assign coordinates to the shape of the user’s ear.
Similarly, rival electronics manufacturer Nokia has developed a new prototype that lets you feel the texture of icons on the screen – a technology that would add a whole new dimension to touchscreen apps. The technology is based on an effect called electrovibration. Touch receptors in the skin can be fooled into perceiving texture when you swipe a fingertip across an alternating voltage. The higher the frequency, the smoother the texture feels.

Since its introduction, the iPhone has had four different models with the most recent released on June 24, 2010. This has raised questions about the cell phone companies waiting a little longer to do more research and test runs for their products before introducing a new model to the market.