Name: The Simple Reason Why Cellphones Are Rectangular
Uploaded: 2020-03-14T02:32:51.000Z
Duration: 9 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Hey, I bet you’re so used to a smartphone in your hand that you’ve never even asked

Reflexive pronouns

yourself a question: why in the world is it rectangular? Why not square or round, for

example? Or why, for that matter, you can’t use it when in gloves? Yeah that bugs me.

Ever tried using your phone on a sunny day? Yeah, even turning the screen brightness up

to the max isn’t gonna work. Why can’t they do something about it? LCD screens, in

fact, sacrifice visibility for better color reproduction. There are screens that show

a clear picture even in direct sunlight, but the color quality in those is much worse.

They are mostly used in GPS navigators and watches because you need to see the objects

on them, while phone manufacturers keep in mind that you could watch movies and play

games on their products. Try doing that under the glaring sun, though.

It's not recommended to use your smartphone while it’s charging, but for some reason

it’s the opposite for laptops. That reason is heat generation: smartphones are small,

so all the heat they accumulate goes to the battery, damaging it over time. While charging,

your phone heats up, so using it might shorten its life. In laptops, the battery is well

isolated from the rest of the parts, and the heat goes around it. And keeping the charge

of the battery up prolongs its service time, so feel free to plug it in and work all you

like. Isn’t it a bit unfair that electric cars

can be fully charged within an hour, but a much smaller smartphone battery needs at least

the same time or even more? Electric cars have large batteries with separate cooling

systems that don’t allow them to overheat while charging. Smartphones will need equally

good cooling not to melt down if charged too fast. And that adds a lot of extra weight.

And on the topic of charging… If you charge your smartphone in the cold,

you may notice it goes up slower than usual. This happens because charging involves chemical

reactions. They need a certain range of temperatures for optimal work, so if it’s too cold or

too hot, your phone will charge more slowly. Its overall performance will be reduced too,

so better keep it in neutral conditions. You probably know that blue light from screens

of smartphones and computers can mess with your sleep. In modern gadgets, though, there’s

an option called “eye-saver mode” or “eye comfort.” It cuts off part of the blue light,

making the screen yellowish, but letting your eyes and brain rest. It’s especially useful

if you work with documents, since you don’t need a full color palette. It’s best to

turn it off only to watch videos or play games to enjoy the juicy picture, and keep it turned

on the rest of the time. The expression “ is the

new black” suits smartphones and other gadgets like nothing else. Even when there are other

color options, black is almost always one of them. The reason boils down to black being

a universal color that fits any surroundings. You might sit in an orange-toned room, dressed

in green and blue, but your black smartphone or black TV will still look okay. Same goes

for white and grey — all these three colors go well with any other.

Now look at an average smartphone and an equally average tablet PC. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Done? okay. The latter has a bigger size and better computing power, but it’s still cheaper

than the smartphone we have here. That’s because the phone has a radio chip and the

tablet does not. Radio chip is probably the most complex part of a smartphone: it has

to be able to work with dozens of different frequencies across the globe and have a huge

range for you to easily talk to anyone in the world. Tablets, on the other hand, don’t

need a radio chip — they have a Wi-Fi one that works with just two standard global frequency

ranges and covers a few hundred feet. Hence the difference in cost.

In winter, it’s annoying that you have to take off your gloves first and only then answer

if someone’s calling you. Or you can use your nose instead. The screen reacts to conductive

materials, and only if they’re a little squishy — they can activate several sensors

at once this way. Gloves don’t conduct electricity, so you either need to use your bare fingers

or buy yourself a pair of gloves with special fingertips. They’re tipped with some rubber

and conductive powder to imitate fingers. When something’s wrong with your device

and you contact tech support, the first question they’d ask is “Did you try turning it

off and back on?” Seems weird, but it actually works. Whatever process is running on your

gadget, it leaves a trace even when you close it. The more processes you run and then close,

the more such traces are left in the memory of your device. And at some point, it might

stop working properly. Rebooting your device helps clear all the unneeded residue and optimize

its work. Better yet, reboot once a week to avoid this trouble altogether.

Now take a good look at your smartphone. It might never have occurred to you, but its

rectangular shape is no accident. And it’s actually what you want it to be. Rectangle

is the most convenient shape for a screen. It has an orientation, so you can flip your

phone all you want and it will adapt. Imagine that with, say, a round-shaped display — you’d

have to always turn it in your hands until the top is where it belongs. Ugh. Next, it

fits into your pocket nice and cozy: the pocket is deeper than it is wide, so a phone longer

than it is broad will sit there perfectly. A square or circular phone will be more of

an inconvenience. Then again, a rectangle is much easier to handle. It fits in your

palm, and it feels better than a circle or a square. And finally, we’re used to having

rectangular things all around us: pictures, sheets of paper, books, photographs. Having

round-shaped screens would’ve been just… weird. Still, there have been attempts to

create circular and square smartphones, but as you can guess, they didn’t get on.

Ever tried taking a photo of that striking moon on your smartphone? If you have, you

know what disappointment is. Yes, that little blurry whitish spot is the same beautiful

celestial body you see in the night sky. Your smartphone camera is just not light-sensitive

enough to capture it in its full glory. Manufacturers trade extra-high quality of photographs for

easiness of use, given that the average smartphone user doesn’t even need professional pictures.

So if you want a breathtaking shot of the starry skies, better get yourself a DSLR camera

with a special lens. Most smartphones now have both rear and front-facing

cameras, but they differ in picture quality a lot. This is because a higher quality camera

requires more space inside the phone, and manufacturers choose to install a smaller

and cheaper camera in the front of their devices to save that space. Instead, they up the performance

of the smartphone itself, which is a good trade-off, if you ask me. After all, the front

camera is mostly used for selfies, and it’s not like you’re gonna print them on a poster.

When you turn your phone or computer off and then on again, the booting process can seem

awfully slow. Why can’t it just start up immediately, right? Well, when you switch

off your device, it dumps everything from its short-term memory. Think of it as hitting

your gadget hard on the head: it forgets everything you did with it and has to remember it again

upon boot-up. So it takes time for the device to wake up and start functioning at its normal

speed. Many modern smartphones have had their headphone

jacks removed. There are two reasons for this: first, without a 3.5 mm jack at the top or

bottom of the phone, you can make the device itself much thinner because it’s now by

far the thickest part of any phone. And second, water resistance is trending today, and a

headphone jack is a gaping hole in the body of a smartphone. Naturally, water can get

in there easily, so getting rid of the jack allows for making the phone waterproof.

Taking photos in the dark with a flash, you must’ve noticed your smartphone flashes

several times before making the actual shot. Remember those horrid red eyes in old photographs

made on film or digital cameras? That happened exactly because the camera flashed only once.

In the dark, the pupils of your eyes become larger, trying to catch more light to see

better. And when they reflect the camera’s flash, the red-eye effect appears. With smartphones,

the first short flash makes the pupils contract from bright light, and only then the device

takes a shot — and you don’t resemble a horror movie creature anymore. At least