Hey friends ,
Can u believe that?? Yes you heard it right.
Microsoft is developing batteries that will last one week
If you go back a decade to when mobile phones just made
phone calls and sent text messages, it was not uncommon to go a week in between
charges. Now, some of us keep cigarette plug chargers in our cars for our
phones.
That's progress.
Actually, battery power has not been slacking.
Ranveer Chandra, senior researcher for mobility and networking at Microsoft
Research, told the crowd at MIT Technology Review’s Digital Summit in San
Francisco that battery power storage density has doubled over the last 15
years. The problem is we have large OLED high-definition screens, touchscreens
and quad-core processors in these phones. So the pace of component development
has exceeded the pace of battery innovation
Microsoft Research senior scientist Ranveer Chandra wants smartphones that can go for a week without a recharge. [Image Source: Microsoft]
Chandra said Microsoft Research has tackled the problem
not just by focusing on the battery technology, but also on making the power
consumption of a device more efficient using existing battery technologies.
One
of the solutions being explored is using two smaller batteries rather than one
large one. The thinking is that one of them would be optimized for high power
usage tasks, such as playing games, while the other would be tuned to release a
much lower current for when the phone is in standby mode or doing very simple
functions.
Batteries
today are optimized for somewhere between standby mode and high power usage
mode, Chandra said. This makes them inefficient because they can't give power
when needed and can't truly power down when not needed. His team has built
prototypes with this twin-battery approach that could improve battery life by
up to 50%.
As
for software optimization, some of the group's efforts have already been rolled
into Microsoft products. For example, Windows Phone has Wi-Fi power management
and a Power Monitoring tool to help Windows Phone developers build more
energy-efficient apps.
Another
idea to extend battery life is known as E-Loupe, which allows a mobile
operating system to identify and police apps that consume a lot of power, even
when a person is not actively using them. It can pause or slow the activity of
a background process, such as downloading a large file, to maximize battery
life.
Chandra
thinks wearable devices and electric cars could also benefit from software that
is able to understand and adapt battery use, which would make sense since
Microsoft is planning on developing a smartwatch. For now, these efforts
largely remain lab experiments.
Thanks.
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