Mobile World Congress 2012 is just a few weeks away, but we’ve already privy to some of the most innovative tech from the show. This week, we headed down to the Smart UK competition to get a sneak peek at some of the gear that’s going to change the mobile phone industry, from right here in the UK.
Nineteen start-ups and app developers were shortlisted for the Brit Awards of mobile tech, and all of them will be shooting off to MWC. Allow us to show you the best – expect big things from these guys shortly.
1. Brighter screens, better battery life
Apical is a company making a big noise in the mobile display world. Its Assertive Display tech is mesmerising: it promises to dramatically increase screen brightness in any condition – while doubling battery life at the same time.
How? We caught up with Apical’s Noman Hashim, who walked us through it. The Assertive Display is a proccessor and sensor: while on display, Hashim has these gubbins glued onto an iPad, and showed it running through a demo app.
When you turn the brightness down to zero on the iPad and turn on the Apical unit, the magic happens. It continually scans every single pixel as the video plays to pick out and brighten up the darker areas. It does this based on input from the light in the room around you.
The effect is striking: when compared to video playback without the tech, you can easily see that Apical’s continuous processing makes the image far brighter.
…Or you could keep your iPad charged with this
But hang on… An extra processor and sensor, and an external one at that? Hashim hinted that Apical is talking to pretty much every major manufacturer – potentially including Apple – about getting the technology built into future devices, although when pressed he maintained that he “couldn’t say as [he’s] under NDA”.
He assured us that the Assertive Display tech can double battery, as the power it uses is ‘negligible’ compared to the saving of having the screen brightness down. Likewise, Hashim claims that the cost of adding in the unit to new products is also ‘negligible.’ iPad movie watching with double the battery life? Sign us up.
2. Waterproof kit
Did you know that the technology that allows the Motorola Defy to survive a dunk in the water is British in origin? What’s cooler is that it’s nothing to do with simply glueing things up and tightening the screws. It’s all thanks to P2i’s Aridion technology.
Aridion is a nanoscopic coating that completely repels water and oil. Coat a piece of tissue paper in Aridion’s invisible, impossibly-thin ionised coating, for instance, and it’ll bounce around in water like it ain’t no thing – remaining completely dry.
The best bit for the mobile industry is that this coating doesn’t affect the usability of the touch screen at all. We’re surprised that Aridion coating isn’t on more devices, given that rain is practically Kryptonite to smartphones.
3. Gesture control
Think that gesture-based tomfoolery starts and ends with Kinect? Wrong. Pyreos is a UK-based company working on completely touchless gesture control for mobile phones. As with Apical, Pyreos has a specially designed sensor and processor that its looking to get into the next generation of smartphones. It’s a little bit like the camera tech Nokia was showing off with an N8 connected by HDMI – just without the need for a clunky telly.
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Whereas front-facing cameras eat through power if you leave them switched on, Pyreos’ setup is comprised of an array of 16 IR sensors, which can be left in an active state without inflicting on battery life.
So what can you do? The possibilities are up to the manufacturer really, but the demo being shown off were for things like waving your hand over the screen to turn off the alarm or mute a call in a meeting. It’s cool stuff that the likes of HTC would love to get involved in, given its penchant for oddities in call muting. As with Apical, however, Pyreos couldn’t tell us who their big name partners were.
This video starts rather slowly, but you can see Pyreos in action from around halfway through:
4. Super fast 3G
There’s a new player in the UK network game. Stream has been helping Three, O2, Orange and more for the last 10 years, but now it wants to go it alone, launching its own range of consumer SIM cards.
What’s special then? Stream has some impressive back-end technology that allows them to achieve download speeds up to 80 per cent quicker than the big guns.
Typically, a Stream SIM will allow you to experience “half the typical download time on non-cached websites and detailed websites like the BBC’s,” says the company’s Director Kevin McDowall.
It’s not the SIMs themselves though, it’s all in Stream’s data management. Stream uses Three’s masts, but has dark fibre and many other tricks swallowing up transfer times.
When asked if Stream’s secret tech could be bought up or licensed to a bigger network, McDowall said “that’s a possibility. We’ve just launched so we’ll see how it goes and see what the reaction is. It’s an exciting time for us.”
If Stream’s blazing fast download speeds do end up as property of one of the UK’s biggest networks it might end some of the upset caused by the delay of the UK’s LTE 4G.
