Nowadays Kids have lots of toys. Toys are not equal. Some toys get more attention than others. Most are just laying in the dusty corners. Lego is favored by many children. They can play with it for a long time. Why? It is because each piece of Lego is quite simple. But the combination of many pieces can be quite sophisticated. That is why Lego is fascinating.
Similarly, like pieces of Lego, smart phone provides many sensors to us. I call the main sensors in a phone 9+N+1. “9″ stands for the small and often neglected position sensors such as digital compass, accelerometer and gyroscope. Each has 3 axis. So it is 9. “N” is the modem connecting with various wireless networks. In Nexus One, there are telephony (GSM, UMTS), bluetooth, gps and wifi. In the future, there might be more such as infrared and LTE. So we call it “N”. “1″ is the camera. “9+N+1″ lays the foundation for data transmission, location sensing, image processing, pattern recognition etc. I can extend the list on and on. But the point is that small phone gives us lots of pieces of Lego. By writing app, we can glue them together to make thousands of different shapes. If you consider that we can connect some peripherals to the phone by USB or through audio jacket, we will have even more pieces of Lego. And the number of combination of final products will increase exponentially. The real and final boundary will be our imagination!
(original post published on Oct 10, 2010)
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