Slashdot Mirror


Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power

Dupple writes in with news about a discovery that should extend the life of your battery in the near future. "Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you've noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that's why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day. It's currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones."

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Please keep me warm... by zippo01 · · Score: 4, Funny

    But what will keep me warm on those long lonely nights while I watching inappropriate things on my phone?

    1. Re:Please keep me warm... by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Funny

      Friction.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  2. Watson arrives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    IBM Watson group announce Watson has solved Smartphone battery problems! Using the magic of connected-world technology, Watson now developed batteries that think-smarter.

    Soon Watson will be moved to self-driving cars, where it will be given the far more difficult task of following a white line around an empty track at superfast speeds! The connected technology painted stripe we leverage allows our world beating Watson to go around faster* than the competitors!

    * You may not benchmark it and no stopwatches will be allowed into the demonstration.

  3. Re:Android battery stats by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 5, Funny

    You must be new on planet news: could save up to 50% means "will probably save less than 5%, but we need a grant".

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  4. Smartphones that Use Half the power by TheInternetGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power

    Seems inefficient, wouldn't it be better if they used all the power?

    --
    If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame