CTIA: Mobile phone advancements that are actually useful

It's CTIA time again and you know what that means: bring in the mobile phones! Instead of dropping a laundry list of new handsets on you, I'd like to highlight two new advancements from the "Why did it take them so long to come up with that?" department. Yes, that's right: among the designer phones, phones with two displays and phones that look like the iPhone, there are a few new technologies that might actually prove useful to the average consumer.

First off is the solution to a problem that all wireless phone users (and by extension, all human beings) face at one time or another: a dead battery. Right now, your options range from embarrassing (discreetly plugging in at McDonald's and hoping that no one notices) to crippling (giving up all hope of maintaining contact with the outside world). Enter Philips: the company's new BackuPower feature on select Xenium handsets will allow the user to run the phone off of a single AAA battery once the internal battery has been depleted. Ridiculously simple yet infinitely useful.

If draining your battery is the number one phone pet peeve, not being able to see your display in direct sunlight can't be far behind. It's a mobile phone, for crying out loud! Those innovators at Samsung have stepped up to the plate, designing a 2.1-inch display that sports what the company is calling "Automatic Brightness Adjustment"--technology that automatically adjusts the brightness of the display depending on the ambient light levels. What's more, Samsung claims that the display sips 20-30 percent less power than comparable, traditional displays, thereby also helping to alleviate that battery problem. Now that's more like it!

For more the these actual, useful technologies:
- see this Gizmodo article on Philips's BackuPower
- and this one on Samsung's new display