Despite the fact that the smartphone market as a whole continues to decline, the segment of expensive models is growing. According to Canalys, in the first quarter of this year, sales of smartphones with a price of $ 500 grew by 4.7%, while the overall market sank by 13.3%.

As a result, premium devices accounted for 31% of all smartphone sales, and it seems that this is the best-selling segment at the moment!

And dominates in this segment, of course, Apple. In the list of best-selling smartphones priced at $500 and above, the first four places are occupied by the iPhone, with the iPhone 14 Pro Max at the top. Fourth place was taken by the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the fifth was the iPhone 14 Plus, followed by the Galaxy S23, and behind it, curiously, the iPhone 12. Moreover, the iPhone SE is also on the list, and of the devices from other manufacturers, there are only Xiaomi 13 and Huawei Mate 50.

Scientists at the University of California – San Diego have created a very useful yet tiny device called the BPClip. It is a clip that is attached to a smartphone and allows you to measure blood pressure. The device is made of ordinary plastic, it can be printed on a 3D printer, while the cost of one copy will be only 80 cents, and with mass production – even 10 cents. It turns out that the BPClip is much cheaper than a conventional blood pressure monitor with a cuff, and the measurement accuracy is almost the same, experts say.

The BPClip needs to be attached to the corner of the smartphone in such a way that the small hole in it is located above the lens of the built-in camera of the mobile device, and the light guide covers the flash. The user has to press on the hole clip with a fingertip: the spring provides resistance, allowing readings of pressures made with different strengths. With each press, the smartphone camera takes a picture of the fingertip illuminated by the flash: each image will be shaped like a red dot. Its diameter increases as more pressure is applied, and the color becomes brighter depending on the volume of blood in the finger.

The smartphone app then analyzes the size and brightness of the dot in various photos and determines the user’s current systolic (highest) and diastolic (lowest) blood pressure. The scientists conducted laboratory tests on 24 volunteers and it turned out that the measurements taken by BPClip are about the same as when using a traditional cuffed blood pressure monitor. So far, the medical gadget has only been connected to the Google Pixel 4, but its creators are already working on compatibility with other smartphone models. American scientists consider the main advantages of their development to be low cost, availability and ease of use: BPClip does not require configuration and can be used by anyone anywhere, without the need to visit a medical facility.

In addition to the new Cortex-X4 supercore, Arm also introduced the new Immortalis-G720 GPU along with the Mali-G720 and Mali-G620 junior solutions.

Immortalis-G720 can have 10 cores or more, Mali-G720 can have 6 to 9 cores, and Mali-G620 can be configured with up to 5 cores.

Overall, Arm talks about a 40% reduction in memory bandwidth usage and a 15% performance boost.

It is also worth noting that the Immortalis-G720, as befits a fresh flagship solution, has a ray tracing acceleration unit, but, interestingly, the Mali-G720 can also have it, but is not required to. This is an explanation of Arm itself, probably meaning that it is physically present in the GPU, but SoC manufacturers can turn it off.

Separately, Arm notes the Immortalis-G720 graphics core’s support for deferred vertex shading and the presence of a 2x MSAA anti-aliasing module.

It is also worth noting that the Immortalis-G715 GPU is used, apparently, only in the SoC Dimensity 9200/9200 Plus. And if MediaTek does start using Nvidia GPUs for its new top-end SoCs, it’s unclear if there will be another company that will bring the Immortalis-G720 to smartphones, as Qualcomm has its own GPU and Samsung continues to partner with AMD.