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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."
Too bad the article has nothing to do with battery technology, and you look a fool.
If you're just going to pick a few sentences out of the article, you should at least talk about "who" and "what". All we've been left with in the summary is "problem description" and "hype"
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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
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
I think it's got a lot lot more to do with:
- Big, bright displays
- Multicore, gigahertz CPU's regularly kept busy with background apps
- Far more sensors embedded in the unit to power - GPS, accelerometers, etc.
Plus, the whole obsession with "the phone must be THIN!!!1!"
If the manufacturers quit worrying about trying to fit the phone into the form factor of an index card, there would be enough thickness for a reasonable battery.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
What this article never really manages to describe is Envelope Tracking (ET). This has been in development for several years. Look at the diagram in http://www.nujira.com/technology-pa-746.php for a better description of the concept. This article describes the application of ET in the handset.