Smartphones are amazing. With their internet connections and hundreds of thousands of apps, they possess some incredible capabilities. Unfortunately, they all share one common weakness--their need for battery power. Every year, the manufacturers replace the current generation with even more powerful chips. While this allows the phone to perform much more efficiently, it also increases the need for power. Coupled with our desire for slim styling, there's no surprise that this is a common sight on many phones:
Because of the relentless demand for power, our perception of new phones is that they are still shackled to outdated battery technology. The truth is that batteries have improved tremendously over the years. The chart below shows some of the amazing progress--particularly after Sony's invention of lithium-ion technology in 1992. They just haven't been able to keep up with the incredible advance of Moore's law.
There are only two ways to improve the situation. You can modify the programming to use the available power more effectively or you can change the types of batteries that you use.
Google is trying the first kind of solution. Android L, its new mobile operating system, includes a battery conservation feature known as "Project Volta." Among the company's most disturbing findings was that waking up your smartphone for one second causes two minutes' worth of battery loss, due to the number of tasks it carries out automatically each time the screen is activated. Project Volta alleviates this drain with a "JobScheduler" function that allows apps to perform background tasks only when the device is plugged in. Project Volta also includes several features that allow app developers and users to figure out which tasks are using the most battery power, and the operating system itself is set up for maximum energy efficiency. Overall, Ars Technica found that Project Volta increased the average Android phone's battery life by 36 percent.
But there's only so much Google, or any other software manufacturer, can do to fix the battery life problem. Energy inefficiency is everywhere – not just in the operating systems we use, but in the antennas that connect our phones to carrier networks, in the apps we run, and, actually, in the internet itself....
The second approach to battery improvement is to switch the type of battery altogether. Researchers are working on this, too, under the assumption that only substantial technical advances will truly give us the all-day (or even multi-day or multi-week) battery life we yearn for, while keeping our devices as slim as we want them.
One of the more promising new battery technologies is graphene, a strong, thin, conductive material that is formed by bonding together a single layer of carbon atoms. Last year, when researchers at Vanderbilt covered a silicon super-capacitator in graphene, they found that it was possible to make a kind of super-battery that would recharge in seconds, and last for weeks before needing to be plugged in. These super-capacitators aren't ready to be put into iPhones yet – engineers are still trying to make them smaller and denser – but they're out there on the horizon.
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Another, more immediately feasible option is a new kind of lithium-ion battery, developed by USC researchers and expected to hit the market in 2015 or 2016, that uses silicon nanotubes instead of the graphite found in traditional batteries. The result is a battery that has three times as much capacity as a normal lithium-ion, and charges in just ten minutes. One Silicon Valley start-up, Amprius, has raised $30 million to mass-produce a similar kind of battery for testing by companies like Nokia.
Here is the link to the full article: The Most Annoying Problem in Computing -- NYMag
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