- [Instructor] Hey, let's talk about smartphones.
Here we have some smartphones.
Smartphones are mobile phones
that have much more processing power
than, say, a standard feature phone,
like a flip phone like this.
Now, feature phones are just meant to be used
for basic phone calls, basic texting, very basic stuff.
They don't have much power.
But smartphones have lots of power.
They're kind of like a computer in a palm of your hands.
You could do desktop like web browsing,
high definition playback of videos, use all kinds of apps.
They have high powered cameras, right?
They can act as recording devices, music players,
personal assistance, you name it.
So the idea with the A+ is,
you're gonna be required to work with, configure,
troubleshoot smartphone, but not really feature phones.
We'll slide those back in way.
So there's our devices here, our smartphones,
and we got a couple here.
We'll go back in time a little bit.
Here we have an HTC Evo. See if it still works.
Okay, it functions.
And this had the slide out keyboard.
You don't really see these types of things anymore.
But it was a great device. Still works.
Built like a tank.
Dropped it off a 30 foot high building,
not on purpose or anything.
But you can see the size progression as time went on.
This smartphone's from about 10 years ago.
So a little bit bigger screen.
This is a Samsung Note 4,
which I got about four years ago.
And you can see much bigger screen.
And at the time, this was considered phablet,
combination of phone and tablet.
But that term has kind of gone away
because this size screen is really normal
for a lot of the smartphones that are out there now.
Six inch screens is very common,
as of the recording of this video,
which is in 2018, by the way.
And here we have a newer one.
And a lot of the devices will look similar to this.
We'll have some volume buttons on the left side.
Nothing on the right side.
On the bottom, we got a speaker
and a microphone and also a USB-C jack
for charging and synchronization.
On the top, another microphone and also headphone jack,
which you may or may not see on some smartphones.
On the back, those cameras we mentioned
and the flash and a power button.
Okay. So that's a newer smartphone.
This was made in 2017, and that's my main device now.
This one actually still works.
I use it for video recording and a couple other things.
But it got a little flaky.
And so I finally moved into the new device.
So let's talk
about typical smartphone hardware specifications.
So we'll place these to side.
And we'll talk about this guy.
Zoom in on him a little bit.
Okay, let's talk about the hardware specifications
for this particular phone.
This one happens to be an LG V30.
And the specifications for this phone are pretty good,
are pretty typical of a flagship phone,
in or around 2017, 2018.
So this one has a 2.45 gigahertz ARM-based CPU.
So it's a RISC-based CPU.
It's Arm technology.
And this one uses a Snapdragon 835,
that's a 64 bit system-on-a-chip, or SoC.
It has mobile DDR, four gigabytes of that.
And the proper title for that is LPDDR4.
This particular one has 64 gigabytes of flash memory.
And that's similar to solid-state drive flash memory.
But you might find phones with 32 gigs, 64, 128, 256,
around the recording of this video, around this time.
So that can change.
And it'll vary from one device to the next.
And a lot of these components, like the CPU,
the RAM, and other components,
they're all put onto one single substrate,
one circuit board.
That's the 64 bit system-on-a-chip.
Really, the 64 bit section is the CPU.
So that is the system on a chip.
This has a multitouch screen.
Multitouch screen, is capacitive.
And if we tap that button on the back, that'll wake it up.
And we'll see our lock screen here.
I don't have any type of password
or anything on this right now, so I can do this faster.
Okay, so we just swiped to open it up.
And you can see that we have a touch screen.
We can use one, two, multiple fingers.
It's a multitouch touch screen.
These devices, they all use lithium-ion polymer batteries.
And that's known as li-ion.
Sometimes you see 'em as li-po, lithium polymer, li-po.
This particular one has 3,300 milliamp hours.
Typically, we're talking about 20 hours
of usage and talk time.
It has a six inch display, which is measured diagonally.
And this one runs at 2880 X 1440 resolution,
which is considered an 18:9 aspect ratio.
This guy is dust and waterproof.
It's IP68 compliant.
And we talked about IP, the IP code in another video,
but this one is IP68.
So the 6 means that it's dustproof, dust tight,
and the 8 means that it is somewhat waterproof.
You can never be 100% waterproof.
It's not protected from water jets.
That would be IP65.
This one's IP68, which means that it can be immersed
in around one meter of water for about 30 minutes.
Different manufacturers might go beyond that.
But the IP68, the 8 portion
requires one meter 30 minutes, really.
So here we have the Note 4, about four years older.
2014 it was made.
And we have a micro USB connector.
Whereas, this one has the USB-C power connector
for charging and synchronization.
This one also has a stylus,
which is proprietary to the particular device you're using.
This device does not have one.
I'm okay with that.
I'm not using a stylus very much anyways.
But you'll notice that this one has the home button here.
It's an actual physical button.
Whereas, this one has the home button as part of the screen
to save space and to have a larger screen.
And they actually hide those buttons, will auto hide.
Power buttons here on this device.
Whereas the power buttons on the back.
Saving space, and just making a little easier.
'Cause you might notice
a lot of people might complain to you,
"Hey, when I hit the volumes,
I hit the power button, and it puts the phone to sleep."
'Cause this is the way they hold it. Right?
So that kind of fixes that problem
on a lot of devices out there.
So that's just the specs for this particular smartphone.
It's typical,
and there's plenty of other smartphones out there.
So a good assignment for you is to go out on the internet
and research the specs for your phone, and see what it has,
as far as CPU, RAM, how much flash memory,
all that stuff, the battery life, the type of display,
whether or not it's IP compliant, 68 or 67.
Some of the older devices are 67.
So definitely check that out.
Let's show this guy in action a little bit.
I'll put him to sleep here.
And to aid with this,
I'm going to hook him up to my video system.
Okay, that wakes up the phone automatically,
whenever you plug it in.
All right, so now we can look at this.
You can see what I'm doing.
And then you can see it on the left side
a little bit bigger, also a little clearer.
So we have our button here that can put the phone to sleep
or wake it up or power it down or power it on.
Here's our home screen.
And you can have different pages or screens
and different apps on different pages.
If you wanna go back to your home screen,
you tap this button here on the bottom in the middle.
That brings you home.
And quite often, that can act as a button
that'll bring up your assistant also,
your personal assistant.
Now, we have some apps on the bottom here.
These are stationary.
They stay regardless of which page you're on.
And you can select most of these.
On most devices, you'll have an apps button though,
and that can't change.
And so if we tap on that,
that'll bring up all the apps that we have
for this particular device.
And we can add them to our screens from here
by tapping and holding.
Go back to the homepage.
Or, if you're in this screen, you could use the back button.
Tap on that, bring us back to where we were before.
And like I say, these buttons are here,
but they're really part of the display.
And they'll disappear when you start using some type of app.
Okay, so for example, we could use the clock here.
We'll tap on that now.
And that brings up the clock,
and I'm on the Stopwatch section,
but you notice that the buttons are gone on the bottom.
We could bring those back up by swiping from the bottom,
and bring them back up temporarily.
Or we can bring 'em up permanently
by pressing this little button on the left.
If we tap that, that'll keep those buttons on there,
if you like that feature.
But a lot of times, people like to auto hide them
and that's quite often the default for this.
Okay, and if we want to go back, we can.
If we wanna bring that app back up or another app
and see what apps we're running, we can press the square.
That'll show the all apps that are running.
And you can see here we have Chrome running and the Clock.
And you can close these by tapping on the X,
or by swiping them across, or by tapping CLEAR ALL
if you wanna clear them all at the same time.
So a little bit of the basic functionality there
and some of the sections of the phone.
Now at the top here, we have the notification area.
And you get various icons on your left,
depending on what apps you're running.
But the icons on the right
are generally the same for most phones.
Now, if you have an Apple iPhone,
it's gonna be quite different than this.
But the general idea will be the same.
This is Android-based.
And for the different manufacturers,
you'll have slight differences.
But generally, you have these same types of icons.
Here we have an icon that shows that we're on vibrate mode.
So the phone won't make noise while I'm recording.
We have a clock, looks like alarm clock.
That means we have some alarms that will run,
that will turn on at some point.
Here we have the plane.
The plane means we're an airplane mode,
and we'll show more about that in a second.
Here we shows where we have 96% battery power and the time.
But not only that, you can swipe down from the top
to get the notification area,
and to enable or disable various services,
and also see all of your notifications.
And we have a little arrow here, and we can change all this.
So airplane mode is running right now.
Now one of the interesting things is,
even if airplane mode is running,
you may not have all wireless turned off,
and location may be running.
If you wanna fully go off the grid,
you'd have to tap that to turn it off.
And some people, sometimes they might be an airplane mode,
but then they'll tap on wifi, which will actually work,
even though we're supposed to be an airplane mode.
So if you look here now,
we have the plane, we're on airplane mode,
but we can also run on Wi-Fi.
You turn airplane mode on and it turns off cellular access.
And that's the main reason for airplane mode.
It also turns off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
But you can turn those on individually,
while keeping cellular access off.
So not only can you see the notifications here
on your screen,
and make lots of changes to these options here,
and we'll be doing some of this in some other videos,
but also we have the settings sprocket.
And if we tap on that,
that'll bring up all of our settings,
Network, Sound, Display, General.
For the most part, we'll be working in the Network settings,
working with things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, tethering,
mobile hotspots, NFC, and so on, screen sharing.
Those are the kinds of things
that you really wanna know for the exam,
but you really should know how to deal
with all these things, Sound, Display, and so on.
So we'll be working in the settings area as well.
Okay, so I just wanna go over a quick tech tip with you.
And that tech tip is,
this watch out for the latest and greatest.
Watch out for the brand new, shiny smartphones,
and tablets for that matter, too.
And there's two reasons for that.
One, for yourself and for your organization,
you wanna go with something
that has a little bit of a track record.
The recommendation that I usually give
is to go with a device that is one generation old
or, say, one year old.
As I mentioned, this video is recorded in 2018.
This is a 2017 model.
But it's not much different than the 2018 flagships.
And that's the idea.
You wanna get something with a track record,
Of course, you wanna test it yourself in your lab,
but you wanna have something
that has a little bit of a track record.
And then also, you wanna try to save money,
you as an individual and you as an organization, right?
So for example, I had this device
for four years, great device.
Getting a little flaky so I had to get something new.
This phone was cheaper
than the new flagship phone, the 2018 phone.
2018 phone was about $750.
This one was able to get for 600.
So automatic savings of 150 bucks.
And the difference in hardware is not that great.
We mentioned, by the way, this is an LG V30,
had it for a little bit, doing pretty well with it,
we'll see how it does,
but we mentioned it has a Snapdragon 835 chip,
that's the CPU.
The newer flagship phone has an 845.
What does that mean?
It's one better, essentially.
So if you look at the specs
and compare the 835 to the 845, you might say,
"Hey, that's not really worth 150 bucks to me."
And a lot of the other hardware is very similar, right?
But beyond that, I was able to get a two for one, the BOGO.
So two for one deal,
actually got two of these for 600 bucks.
So that's really the kind of thing you wanna look for.
Save yourself a lot of money.
That could pay for an A+ exam,
if you're in the market for a new phone.
Otherwise, just hold on to your old phone and keep using it,
save the money.
But if you are in the market for a phone,
try and go by that mindset,
one generation old, one year old.
And this is the mindset that I use
with everything hardware and software, pretty much.
As an organization, you can get great deals,
where you can get several phones
or a dozen phones at excellent rates,
if they're a year older,
and manufacturers are trying to get rid of them,
or its suppliers are trying to get rid of them.
So that's my tech tip for you.
Try to go for something a year old,
maybe a generational old, it depends.
Because two things, one, you want something
with a good track record proven,
and two, you want something that you can save money with.
And so, if you're interested
how I'm doing this dual display here, by the way,
I just have the phone connected with a adapter.
And this is a USB on one end
on the right side here to HDMI.
This says an HDMI female.
And then I just have an HDMI cable here,
plugged into my video recording unit.
There's lots of other ways to do mirroring, of course.
You could do it wirelessly in various ways also.
So there's a little bit about smart phones.
And definitely do some homework on your own phone.
Check out the specs. Know as much as you can.
Understand the terms when it comes to those devices.
And that's about it for this video.