10 Features to Look for from Samsung Galaxy S20

Always-on personal “dash-cam”

© Panumas Yanuthai /Shutterstock.com

However, the price of storage is declining by half every year (OK, every 14 months, but I want to keep the math simple). In less than a decade, assuming that these trends continue, you could store every word, every bad driver you encounter (I am thinking about you, Mr. Paul and Mr. Madamba), every move you make, every breath you take, in a year for about $10.

So why would you want to? Well, for one, video is wonderful if you are a victim of a crime. Second, it is very handy if you are ever accused of a crime to have solid evidence that you were not there. Next, this information would be very handy for lost children or mentally challenged adults for their protection.

With scenarios such as this, it is hard to imagine all the possibilities, but the technology is here today and the costs are coming down fast, so it is not unreasonable to imagine that, in the 2020s, someone’s Samsung Galaxy S20 will be used for this purpose.

Home IoT services to differentiate real estate

New delivery concepts

Here is the future: Your smartphone will increasingly be used as the place to arrange for delivery. You can arrange to have physical stuff delivered to where you are, rather than an address. Shippers know where you will be based upon your smartphone, and can deliver to you personally.

This delivery can be by a drone, but more likely, it will still be by truck. They can find you and get the physical what-ever-it-is-that-you-want in your hands quicker than you can say Jack Robinson (i.e., impressively fast).

Smarter customer care for your phone

This is why, if you bring your phone back to the store reporting a problem, your carrier will tend to swap out your old phone for a brand new one.

Usually, you’ll just take the new phone and walk out with a big smile on your face. This outcome is good customer care for most products — but not necessarily good customer care for smartphones. The reason? One of the most common sources of trouble has nothing to do with the phone at all. For example, you may have left your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on all the time, causing your battery to drain too fast. You may have left your phone on your dashboard and cooked the battery. Or, through no fault of your own, you may have downloaded two badly written apps that conflict with each other, causing the CPU in the phone to run nonstop as these two apps battle it out for resources. The problem here is that unless someone spends the time to help you with the underlying problem, you’ll be back in the store with the same problem.

At that point, however, you cannot return your phone. If you’re sympathetic, or very annoying, your carrier may give you a refurbished phone. You walk out of the store, but without the biggest smile on your face. Unfortunately, nobody dealt with the underlying trouble, so you’ll be back, once again, with the same problem.

No surprise if you start to think that the problem is with that darn phone. In fact, the store needs to listen to you about how you’re using the phone and then help you get the most out of it. This is hard to do in a retail environment where the sales force is under pressure to sell lines of service and gets no concrete reward for helping you with your problem.

This is where smarter customer care comes in. With the proper tools, you can work with a product expert to troubleshoot your phone. Some companies specialize in understanding the underlying problems and coming up with solutions for consumers. This kind of customer care costs the carriers a little more, but it makes for fewer unnecessary returns of perfectly good phones — and for much happier customers.

Smartphone as entertainment hub

• Intelligent Big Screen TV or Dumb TV with a set-top box for home entertainment.
• Home Stereo System for immersive music.
• Home PC/Laptop for home management and entertainment.
• Work or School PC/Laptop This helps you keep home and work separate.
• Tablet for the folks that find the larger screen to complement their smartphone.
• Gaming Console for games.

• Docking your smartphone to your big-screen TV and/or stereo system is not very convenient.
• Docking your smartphone so that you can use a full-size computer screen, keyboard, and mouse is also not very convenient.
• The tablet screen size can be easier to view.
• The digital music on my smartphone is great, but there are many people who still want access to their DVD, CD and/or vinyl collections.
• Gaming Console still have better games than what are available on a smartphone.

Driving in your car

What about the car unlocking and adjusting the seats and mirrors when you get close without one of those bulky key fobs? What about communication between your car and phone that would more intelligently let you use certain phone features if you are in the passenger seat rather than the driver seat or, if you are in the driver seat, to give you the freedom to check some texts while the traffic is stopped.

It is generally preferable for car to have its Intelligence built in and run off the car battery. That said, your smartphone knows more about you and your preferences. The best of both worlds is when you’re car your phone can collaborate to provide the best and safest experience.

Serving you better

The first is in much better mobile advertising. There has been talk for a long time that advertisers can tell where you are and then give you ads or coupons based upon your proximity. This is just now starting to become a reality. It’s still kinda clumsy. If you have been Googling, say, televisions, you may see ads relating to sales about televisions. In the future, however, your phone may tell you about a sale going on for Samsung televisions when you walk by the Sears store in the mall. That is cool.

Even cooler is to be told that that particular model is on sale at the Wal-Mart store and that this particular sale is the best in town by over $20. This can happen if you are doing research at the moment. It may be possible for your app to flag you if you have ever done this kind of research on the Internet.

The second way smartphones are enhancing service is by automating the order-taking process. For example, wherever you see a video kiosk, that company can allow you to interact with the information on the kiosk with your Samsung Galaxy S20. Some fast-food restaurants have installed kiosks so that customers can bypass the line to order from the menu. The items are totaled and paid for by credit card. The customer steps aside and waits for his or her number to be called.

This exact transaction could take place on your smartphone. You don’t have to wait while the guy in front of you struggles to decide between a double cheeseburger or two single cheeseburgers … and hold the pickles. Instead, you can place your order on your smartphone and wait with eager anticipation to find out what toys are in your kid’s meal.

Placing you indoors

There is a confession to be made. GPS doesn’t work so well within buildings. Once you are in a building, your phone only kind of knows where you are. The satellite responsible for sending out signals so that your phone can figure out your position is no longer visible, and the GPS in your phone waits patiently until it sees another satellite. Until then, it stops trying to figure out where you are.

This is rarely a problem if you are, say, at your home. It is probably only a few thousand square feet. Things are altogether different if you are wandering around the Palazzo Casino in Las Vegas. At 6.95 million square feet, this building has the most floor area of any building in the United States.

You could be anywhere in the 160 acres of luxury resort space. It is unfortunate if the Carnevino Steakhouse sends you a mobile coupon offering a two-for-one meal to your Galaxy S20 while you are already sitting in the Delmonico Steakhouse. It can be a tragedy if you start choking on too big a bite of your porterhouse steak and emergency services cannot find you.

There are some efforts out there to come up with a better way to locate you when you are indoors. One approach has been to estimate your location based upon signal strength of known Wi-Fi access points. Companies that hire a large number of smarticles (smart people) are trying a variety of technologies to address this problem. May the best company win so that we may all get better location-based services!

Better 911 services

To put this in perspective, your smartphone is designed to work with data at up to 300 million bits per second. When you call 911, the phone that answers your call is designed to work with data at up to 120 bits per second. (Seriously. I am not making this up.)

Many states and regions are trying to address this problem. This effort is called next-generation 911, or NG911. NG911 promises to make the information you already have on your phone available to the people who are sending you help. This new technology is slowly being implemented region by region in different states and counties.

For example, most 911 dispatchers can’t access the data from the health sensors described in the previous section. With NG911, you can set up your phone so that first responders receive your vital signs and EKG the moment they get the call to respond to your emergency.

With a larger data pipeline between your smartphone and the first responders, you can send anything that’s relevant, including medical history, your emergency contacts, insurance data, and whether you have any protection orders against stalkers. All this information can help you — and it’s available right away because regardless of where you happen to be, your phone is typically there with you.

Reducing your carbon footprint

The next step beyond remote control is even smarter courtesy of your S20. It will not only be able to tell when you leave the house, but also know your location and direction and how soon you’ll be home. In addition, the central hub will monitor your use of electricity and be able to tell what appliance is in use. It can tell the difference between the power use for your oven, the hot water heater, and the television.

So if you forgot to turn off the iron on the ironing board as you drove away from home, no problem. The hub sends you a text. You tell the hub to turn off the iron from your Galaxy S20. When the hub sees you’re gone, it adjusts the thermostat to require less power. When the hub sees that you’re on your way home, your smart home readjusts the thermostat so that everything is comfortable when you walk in the door. Your smart home is no longer making its best guesses based upon what it thinks is your normal routine. Your smart home knows exactly where you are and how soon you’ll be walking in the door because your trusty smartphone let the hub know. This all reduces your power consumption without any inconvenience to you.