Inquisitive

iPhone 3GS - Thermal Images

Infrared Thermography is an exciting technology with lots of applications ranging from predictive maintenance, defense, medical and now to find out my iphone's body heat signature

When iphone 3GS was launched, there were few reports of iphone getting overheated. Whether the reports were true or not, apple released an advisory on keeping the iphone within operating temperatures. You can read that here  - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2101. Even there is a temperature warning screen built in.

    

So I picked up my thermal camera and prepared to do a test with my iphone 3GS which includes taking a image after a period of charging and another image after using the phone intensively for some time by playing games and watching videos. The tests are to find out the hotspots and maximum temperature that the phone is reaching after a period of normal usage.

The thermal images below shows the hotspots of iphone 3GS taken after ten minutes of usage. To put the thermal images in context, I had attached a terrible paint brushed image below. I am pretty sure that the big red spot is because of battery but not sure about the spot at bottom right corner, when you face the back of iphone towards you. I had searched ifixit 3GS tear down but couldn't figure out what causes it to overheat at that particular spot. But there is nothing to worry about as it is within the operating temperature but I am just curious to know. 

 If you are aware, please comment.. 

     

            

But I never felt that my iphone is overheating.. Do you??

Snow Leopard..... Rawrrrrrrrrrrrrss

I had recieved my Snow Leopard DVD, a day before what Apple had promised. My Mac fleet includes a 13.3" Macbook aluminium and a 13.3" Macbook Pro. Since the Macbook pro was bought recently, I was eligible for the Apple Up to Date program and I got my upgrade disk for just 9.95$

You can get yours here if you are eligible >> http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/

My Macbook pro has 4 gigs of memory and it took nearly 45 mins for the upgrade to complete. I didn't face any glitch during the upgrade process. 

Then came the surprise.. I didn't notice much new visually when I booted into Snow Leopard. My bad.. I remembered what Apple had said.. Refined not re-invented. Let's look at some of the great improvements..

Technology Improvements :

  Invented to take full advantage of today's multicore and multiGHZ processors.  It helps developers to develop applications that runs efficiently on multicore systems. For a normal user, will experience the speed and performance of new generation applications

        Now you can have tons of RAM for your Mac (upto 32 gigs) now with Snow Leopard than just 4 gig before. With 64 bit you can crunch twice the data per clock cycle. All your inbuilt OS X applications are 64 bit. Again a normal user will experience the significant performance in designed for 64-bit applications

  Again a developer stuff and now developers can leverage the gigflops of computing power available in new gen graphics cards

  Shame on you Microsoft !!

 The Chinese character input is cool, an innovative use of the touchpad 

As promised, I had gained back few gigs of hard disk space. Some say it's because of new math that Apple is using for Snow Leopard. Overall there are nice improvements, small and big everywhere.

Good reviews :

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/26/snow-leopard-review/

http://gizmodo.com/5346418/snow-leopard-review-lightened-and-enlightened?skyline=true&s=x

Snow Leopard Rawrrrrrrrrrrs!!