How your mobile phones and laptops lie to you

Your mobile phone and laptop are constantly lying to you. Referring to the signal strength and battery life displays on such devices, blogger Dan declares,"Neither display is actually telling you what you think it's telling you." For example, four or five bars of reception on your mobile phone does not necessarily equate a high-quality conversation. The reason is because the signal bar does not take into consideration the amount of interference at your current location, or the signal-to-noise ratio. Ditto that for Wifi signal strength.

It gets worse when it comes to battery meters--especially those for mobile phones. Dan highlights how mobile phones seem to spend most of their time showing a full or almost full reading. However, the situation goes downhill--to flat, pretty quickly once the gauge reaches the halfway mark. Dan attributes this to pressure from marketing departments to reflect higher performance than is actually the case.

To check out what Dan has to say:
- check out the blog entry at Dan's Data