There is no doubt that the field of personal electronics is one of the largest earning industries in the world; with millions of mobile phones being manufactured, there is a definite need to own and have what is generally conceived to be a personalized handset. Of course, handset manufacturers are laboring hard each day to create new smart phones that will even have more customizable features.

Innovation is not always up to the phone manufacturers alone. Companies such as Qualcomm also play an important part in shaping the industry as well. In fact, the company that is known for the Snapdragon CPU is now back working on creating faster CPUs and has already achieved what could potentially be the new industry standard; the first new Snapdragon processor that will be running at 1.2 GHz.

The current industry standard is 1GHz. And while 0.2 is not all that large a number, the change in speed is a significant boost. Thanks to this, more mobile devices will be able to handle resource intensive apps better, have better loading times and of course, push the limit to the kinds of apps that can be played in a single smartphone.

The processor is not the only part getting an update. The touch screen display technologies for smart phones are also being improved with each passing day. Several manufacturers are focused on creating new ways to achieve a better 3D effect while others focus on technologies that make use of super thin flexible screens that could serve as a major catalyst that changes how mobile phones are designed and manufactured.

Battery life is also a serious issue, but as Apple and Asus has shown, it is possible to have a good product and still maintain a good power management setup –the iPad and the Asus Eee products has shown that there are commercial viable devices that can last for over 10 hours when in use. Intel also promised the same thing with their new Atom processor.

When we refer to history, we often take it as a way of looking back at human society and how we have evolved throughout the years. Most museums often give us a good point of study as they hold key objects that have existed during specific eras and provide us with a glimpse of how things and life was at that time.

Now, imagine if by simply pointing a mobile phone at the barcode on that park bench, you get to catch a detailed list of all the people who have been sitting there and getting to know the things that they did (or perhaps that was not such as good example but anyway). This is the new study being undertaken by the University College London as it launches the Tales of Things program where in various objects from the Oxfam shop are barcode-d and sent to various owners.

Each item owner will be adding new data to the barcode and as such, information about various events, images and other associated data will be attached to the device –like a digital diary or blog.

It is interesting and amusing for most people, but for some specialists, the information that can be gathered and analyzed would be priceless. For many who study behavioral sciences and psychology, these bits of data that can be found are not only telling of the objects themselves, but also of the people that have held them throughout. This will allow us to understand our society better.

Of course, the technology is still new and yet to be fully implemented. Thanks to mobile phone technology however, getting this running is a simple matter of developing the 2D barcode extensively and creating an app that would allow users to instantly scan the barcode to read existing data and possibly, adding new ones.