se our work and social lives. They have more advanced imaging and audio capture capabilities than standard phones. Super phones, also known as 'future phones' in that they did not exist in 2005, would change the way in which we relate to the physical world around us. Super phones would have advanced audio and image capture capabilities equal to or better than human audio and video processing systems, have equivalent memory resources but significantly better memory retrieval than human memory systems, a better sense of direction than most humans and an enhanced ability to sense temperature, gravitational forces and electromagnetic fields. Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial Success, First Edition. Geoff Varrall. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Making Telecoms Work 10.1.1 The Semisuper Phone In a sense the ingredients for a semisuper phone were already available. We could capture 20 kHz or more of audio bandwidth using solid-state microphones, capture low-g gravity gradients using 3-axis accelerometers and have low-cost phones that included a temperature sensor, digital compass and positioning capabilities and build software added value on all of these hardware attributes. However, a super phone has to be as good as or better than humans at more or less everything. This means having imaging bandwidth that is at least perceptually equivalent or preferably better than our own human visual system, able to see and hear the world in three dimensions. This is why humans have two ears and two eyes in order to gauge distance and depth and in order to respond and react to danger or opportunity. Similarly, humans have a well-evolved optical memory. We remember events visually albeit sometimes rather selectively. There are, however, still significant hardware constraints. Imaging resolution even with high-end CCD' sensors, the 40-megapixel CCD referred to in the last chapter for example, is still short of present human resolution (about 200 megapixels). Imagin