This phone knows how much calories each meal has

smartphone scanning strawberries

A while ago we wrote about portable spectrometer / molecular food scanner SCiO and its success at the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Well what do you know — this technology has been shrank and integrated into a smartphone, which is still not available to buy but will be in the near future, starting with China, with other countries to hopefully follow soon afterwards. After all, we already carry phones wherever we go, so why not use them to know the nutritional contents of the food we’re eating, right?

The name of this upcoming phone is Changhong H2, and just like SCiO – it uses infrared sensor to register the unique molecular fingerprint of an item. Simply point it to anything, and it will tell you what it is. This could be particularly useful for those allergic to certain kinds of food, and for those on a specific diet (i.e. gluten-free diet). Alternatively, you may just want to know how much sugar a certain cake has — there’s an app for that.

Beyond food, this smartphone — and the SCiO device for that matter — could tell you whether some medicine is legit or a placebo, or contains some different substance than advertised.

According to TheVerge, the software still feels like work in progress, but nevertheless — it is impressive what you can cram in a smartphone today and make it widely available to just about everyone.

The price of the phone is still unknown and so are its exact specs. The prototype unit that was shown at CES rocks an 8-core CPU and a 6-inch screen, but that part is, I guess, not as important.