The Android 10 hardware revolution
The latest Android release comes with plenty of focus on hardware. In fact, one of the changes will end up staring you in the face. Darren Yates explains.
Well, that’s the end of an era. Since the arrival of version 1.5 ten years ago, Android has managed to capture child-like enthusiasm for each new release with a new scrummy confectionary codename. But, presumably not finding anything decent beginning with ‘Q’ (quinces have always been under-rated – and yes, they’re a fruit), Google has given us a much more grown-up ‘Android 10’. While there’s been plenty of talk about new dark themes and other new features, like gesture navigation, we’re taking a look at the new OS from a hardware perspective – and what you’ll see coming in your next phone.
BREAKING THE SPEED LIMIT
One of the ‘slow burn’ changes coming to Android phones isn’t exactly the result of Android 10, but looks like coinciding rather nicely – and that’s high-speed display panels. Since day-dot, phone screens of all persuasions (like many PC screens) have had a standard 60Hz refresh rate. However, over the course of the last 18 months or so, what first started as a trickle has become a steady hum of news from vendors all threatening to launch phones with new high-speed display panels. Gaming brand Razer got the game rolling in 2017 with its Razer Phone, packing in a 5.7-inch Sharp IGZO LCD panel refreshing at a default rate of 90Hz, but settable up to 120Hz.
Razer was no doubt gunning for the gaming market with its higher refresh rate, but in more recent times, we’ve started seeing the floodgates open, particularly in the last few months, as more brands have either announced or just launched devices with high-speed panels – and not just in flagship models.
But while some bloggers are now more or less claiming they won’t get out of bed for anything less than a 90Hz phone, the question is what difference
“Razer was no doubt gunning for the gaming market with its higher refresh
rate, but in more recent times, we’ve started seeing the floodgates open. ”
does a 90, 120 or even 240Hz screen refresh rate actually make? Have we got to the point where everything else in a phone display has been updated over the years and the refresh rate is the last thing to get punters excited about, or is there a genuine benefit to be had?
Like most things, it’s not that black-and-white. Because we’re dealing with screens that also have a touch interface, there are three factors to consider – 1) the panel refresh rate, 2) the video frame rate and 3) the touch refresh rate. The panel refresh rate is how many times the panel updates the image per second – that’s the 60Hz rate we’ve had on most phones. The video frame rate is the rate content – think videos and games – is produced at and sent to the display panel. The touch refresh rate is how often the touch layer is sampled to receive your instructions.
Factors 1 and 3 are determined by your phone hardware, factor 2 more by software. To get the maximum benefit from higher-speed refresh rates, you need all three factors to operate at higher (and ideally sync-locked) speeds.
However, while there’s a good array of games supporting higher refresh rates, there’s little streaming content offering 90fps.
However, even without higher frame rates, you’ll still see a general improvement in the smoothness of a phone’s animations (scrolling, swiping etc) from just a faster refresh rate. It should also feel more responsive to touch with a higher touch refresh rate.
So, which phones have which improvements? The only phone with a higher touch refresh rate at the moment is the Apple iPhone XS, with its 120Hz touch refresh rate. Users say it’s an improvement, however, it’s matched to only a 90Hz display refresh rate, so it’d likely improve a bit more if a common 120Hz rate was used.
This is in contrast to the number of higher display refresh rate phones coming out of the woodwork. At the moment, Japanese phone (and wellknown LCD panel) maker Sharp holds the title with its new Aquos zero2 phone. We won’t likely see it here in Australia officially, but it delivers a whopping 240Hz display refresh rate. Overkill? Possibly, but if the phone could deliver 240fps content to that panel, you’d have to think it’d look as smooth as silk.
The OnePlus 7 Pro and newly-released OnePlus 7T both come equipped with 90Hz panels and if you have the 2017 Razer Phone or its Razer Phone 2 successor, congrats, for you’ve obviously had up to 120Hz for some time. However, its rumours that Google is looking like dropping a 90Hz panel into the new Pixel 4 XL phone that should get more manufacturers thinking ‘refresh rate’. That’ll end up meaning one of the biggest changes coming to phones could soon well be staring you in the face – literally.
CONTAMINANT DETECTION
Your phone’s USB port really is its lifeblood – you charge your device battery with it, swap files with it, you can even plug in external devices like microscopes if it supports USB-OTG. But Android hasn’t offered much in the way of electrically protecting the port should anything go wrong – until now. Android 10 includes smart monitoring and detection support of the USB port electronics. Should any liquid or debris threaten to damage the port, the OS will now have the ability to disable the port, warning you with a notification alert. What’s more, it looks like being be part of the ‘mandatory’ pack of features that all new Android 10 phones will have to support.
There’s also another USB feature – and that’s overheat monitoring. Word is Android 10 will also be able to warn users if the USB port is overheating (tops 60°), whether it’s been on charge too long, or having too much power drawn from it. We reckon this is an important feature, particularly given the prevalence of high-speed charging now available. However, there are a couple of problems here – first, USB temperature monitoring is said to be only an ‘optional extra’, so it’ll be a feature added to flagship phones only, no doubt. The other problem is that it only warns the users that the port is overheating. Unlike the debris and liquid protection, Android 10 will not turn off the USB port if it overheats. That might make some sense, particularly if the phone is supplying power via USB-OTG to an external device, but if it’s a charging rate issue, this is where port protection would be useful.
AUDIO PLAYBACK CAPTURE
Android has long had the ability to make screen videos, whether you’re making video tutorials or capturing gameplay. For the first time, Android 10 now adds in the ability to capture audio.
The primary focus of this feature is to make better gameplay videos and the good news is that according to Google, the AudioPlaybackCapture API (application programming interface) used to grab the audio does not create any latency issues for the games you’re trying to capture. However, if you’re thinking this could be a new way rip some of your favourite content streams, such as the odd Netflix series, cool your jets.
Capturing audio being played back by another app is essentially a handshake agreement between the two apps – the app playing the audio and the app trying to capture it. Both apps have to allow playback capture, otherwise you get nothing. What’s more, you can be sure Netflix will be ensuring its app doesn’t allow other apps to capture its audio.
From the Android 10 developers’ info, this looks very much an ‘opt-in’ feature. Developers have to set the app player usage setting to ‘usage_media’, ‘usage_ game’ or ‘usage_unknown’. In addition, the player’s capture policy has to be set to ‘AudioAttributes.ALLOW_CAPTURE_BY_ ALL’ before you get any joy. No doubt, you can be sure Netflix and others will be using ‘AudioAttributes.ALLOW_ CAPTURE_BY_NONE’.
Still, this is a win for gamers and should result in lots of cool new gameplay videos.
CAPTURING GAME AUDIO WITHOUT ANDROID 10
It’s complicated, but you can capture game audio and create audio-filled gameplay videos even without an Android 10 device. Connect your phone’s headphone socket to your PC’s line-in input and record the audio using a good audio editor like Audacity. At the same time, capture the game video stream using a screen recorder app on your
phone. Just before you begin game play, you need to create a couple of synchronisation markers – whether that’s firing your weapons or whatever, just something you can use to sync up the audio and video streams afterwards. When you’re done capturing, bring the two media files into your PC and use a non-linear editor (NLE) app, such as Vegas Movie Studio or whatever, to join them into a single audio-video stream. As I said, it’s complicated, but is certainly do-able. Android 10 just means you don’t need to do any of this.
IMPROVED MIDI SUPPORT
One of the things iOS has always been pretty good at from a musician’s viewpoint is MIDI. Musical Instrument Digital Interface has been around for a thousand years, but it seems like Android has almost always struggled with latency issues, meaning you press a note on a keyboard and sometime later, it’s registered in your MIDI app. Android 10 introduces a new Native MIDI API called ‘Amidi’ and the benefit is that it will allow app developers to send and receive MIDI data using much, much faster C/C++ code.
We won’t go into it in depth (I’m not a MIDI expert), however, the way it works is that instead of coding MIDI connections and data using the current Java Native Interface (JNI), app developers will still use Java to set up a MIDI connection, but they’ll now be able to send and receive data to and from a MIDI service using C/C++ code using the AMidi API once that MIDI connection has been made.
This should help further reduce latency issues – but like most Android 10 features, you’ll have to wait for developers to incorporate the new API calls into new apps.
MULTI-DIRECTIONAL MICROPHONES
Alan Blumlein was a brilliant electrical engineer working for what would become music giant EMI when he invented stereo recording back in 1931. But while recent high-end Android phones now come with two or more microphones, this is has been more about noise-cancelling and improving call quality than genuine ‘right-left’ stereo recording.
Android 10 doesn’t fix this problem specifically, but it does come with a new MicrophoneDirection API. App developers will now be able to select different microphones for different applications, for example, a front-facing mic for selfie videos. Of course, the device has to have more than one mic for this to work, but it’s a start.
However, the key feature here is the ability to set what’s known as the ‘field dimension’. Zoomable microphones are much like a telephoto or zoom lens, in that they allow you to focus the audio area or ‘field’ the microphone picks up. Android 10 includes a new ‘setPreferredMicrophone FieldDimension’ interface that uses a decimal or ‘float’ (floating point) number ranging from -1 (wide angle) to 0 (flat) to 1 (maximum zoom).
As we said, most Android phones still have work to do when it comes to high-quality audio capture features, so we reckon that unless things change, this is a feature most likely to be used by smart home devices, like Google Home, Home Hub and Nest Hub.
THERMAL LOAD MANAGEMENT
When app developers build and release Android apps, they basically have no control over the environment those apps operate in, not just from a performance perspective, but also a thermal one. For example, if your game app runs on a device with all game specs on full, what happens to the device temperature, or its ‘thermal load’?
Android 10 includes a new Thermal API that allows app developers to monitor and adjust app power loads. It works by the app developer writing a ‘listener’ function that eavesdrops on Android’s PowerManager feature. PowerManager is where Android updates all things ‘power management’, from processing load and thermal performance. App developers will be able to monitor the thermal stress of the device on a six-level scale, starting at ‘light’ and progressing to ‘moderate’, ‘severe’, ‘critical’ and ‘emergency’. If you get back ‘shutdown’, that’s Android saying the universe is about to implode.
The downside to this is the Android warning that mucking around with PowerManager means ‘device battery life will be significantly affected’. Still, possibly better that than your phone melting like the sun in your hand.
INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS
There may be no more ice-cream sandwiches, lollipops or pies, but Android 10 actually does have plenty of new features, some you’ll hear lots about, others you won’t. Many of these features will allow app developers to build new apps with greater hardware capabilities, from being smarter with temperature loads to smoother user interfaces and more versatile audio. Not to mention some silky new display panels.
You need
■ Any model of Raspberry Pi ■ A desktop/ laptop ■ Internet connection ■ Breadboard
■ 2x 330 Ohm resistors (Orange, Orange, Brown, Gold)
■ 2x LEDs
■ Buzzer
■ 6x female-to-male jumper wires
Code: https://github.com/
■ lesp/LXF255/archive/master. zip