Newly developed memory could make your smartphone battery last 10 times longer

If they apply this idea to dynamic RAM, the information is lost after some milliseconds without refresh. Great.

@electric.... i'm pretty sure they know that.. they are the one actually building the thing

If their one thing I hate about my iPhone is the crappy battery!!! I can not wait for a decent battery!!!! Go Tohoku University Go!!!

I'm queueing already, got my tent set up and all...

A very nice invention! But the batteries die fast only because of 3G/4G connections. My 1.5 year old iPhone still goes strong in the evening if I don't use the 3G.

They always go on about "New technology will improve battery by 10-fold!" And then 5 years later nothing happens.

@David Navarro,

Have you not seen the iPhone 4 teardown? The battery takes up 3/4 of the phone. You're not about to get any more battery than this.

@Techie

3G.. Yes, and i've done some tests out of sheer curiosity. If the phone is idling with the screen off, radio is by far the biggest drain on the battery, with 3G, followed by WiFi, although together they can draw even more. Battery life with 3G signal is ~18 hours before i have to recharge, even if i'm not using the phone, maybe due to how metal cabinets affect my signal. WiFi can be ~2 days. No radio can be 4 days without recharging. This is unscientific and very approximate, however.

That was my Palm Pre, and my other phone, a high end flip phone from mid '07 which is also 3G equipped could last a week on a fresh charge, maybe even 9.5 days, depending on connectivity, if nobody calls.

This tells me that Linux phones spend a lot more battery power simply idling, due to the software architecture. I've also heard the same thing from a Symbian programmer, that the older more "primitive" embedded operating systems idle better, with fewer processes and fewer components being active...

Some guys at PreCentral have experimented with underclocking the CPU to reduce power consumption, but at least two people who used the hack ended up with a burnt out cellular radio (Wifi chip was alright), so it didn't turn out the way we wanted. My solution was to buy a Duracell backup plug-in battery that i found in the clearance rack being half off ($15), and i'm quite happy with it :)

Jose:

In older times there existed memory consisting of ferrite cores. These actually only needed energy for the active cell. And this is where the name "core memory" comes from. Now there is the idea to re-use the idea by employing tiny magnetic domains.

And if I think of "good old" static RAM. My Sharp programmable BASIC pocket calculator runs on 2 mercury cells for more than one year. Problem with static RAM: it uses more components than DRAM and therefore is more expensive to manufacture.

@Thomas,

That's an illusion. Because the faster and more powerful new hardware gets, the bulkier becomes code that runs on it, "because they can".... The code expands to fill whatever new hardware capabilities come to market.

This is because many programmers own the best hardware you can find, since they have to compile the code they write, and want it to compile faster. Naturally, when testing their code on this kind of hardware, they are oblivious to little memory bottlenecks, bloat and inefficient processes. Even the good guys can let this happen when deadlines come up, but rent-a-coders are much worse, due to their incompetence and the quality of code they reuse from project to project. Me, since i don't compile anything on my machine, i do my work on a 3 year old netbook, and any little issue gets noticed and addressed immediately. I mostly do web and mobile stuff, hence the different approach.

If you don't believe me, take a look at Windows 98 and Vista, for a side by side comparison. The 98 has more holes than a sieve, but that's irrelevant for the sake of this conversation. On their recommended hardware, they are roughly as fast as the other, but if you take an older machine designed for XP, halfway between the two and test each OS on it, 98 is blazing fast and Vista as slow as molasses (if it will install at all), esp if you tried doing certain things in Word 2003.

Maybe i'm not being clear, but code will get as big as you will let it, and exponential improvements in processor power and memory will seem only incremental, and when you add a couple of viruses, a BHO, a spam mailer and a root kit, you might even feel that old hardware was somehow more powerful, if you're looking at a clean install.

Oops, you're talking about battery life... well, same difference. Hardware becomes more powerful and the new devices are designed to get the most out of current battery technology, even if it means poor battery life.

Also, meany technologies aren't good enough for primetime, even if they show a lot of promise in the lab. Usually some component is the weakest link, and it either oxidizes, overheats or is too tricky to mass-produce, to the technology is shelved until the required material/part/whatever becomes more viable

1) Resistive memory has been around for ages, in fact, Rambus demonstrated a ReRAM chip that is 0.3ns, three times faster. 2) Memory currently uses a very small fraction of mobile devices, perhaps 1-2% on most modern phones. In comparison, the screen can use up to 80% of the power, and antennas usually >10%. A five to 10 times boost would be assuming the device is only made of memory. 3)The commentary about commercialization is false and misleading. From research to commercialization takes five years at best, unless the research has nothing to do with the design process or manufacturing (which this does). With something unknown like this one (no information given on type), it could be ten, twenty, or never. And it will likely be never, since we don't know the requirements of that technology and if it's even possible to commercialize.

In comparison, the screen can use up to 80% of the power, and antennas usually >10%

Most of that is the backlight, i presume. On my Nokia N900, i can turn off the backlight when i'm outside and the sun is bright. The LCD panel they used has a silver film behind it, just like a calculator LCD, unlike my other phones, and reflects enough light to see everything, like the screen on the Nintendo GameBoy Color i had as a kid, but with a breathtaking resolution and color depth :)

That's useful, considering that it's a Flash-enabled device, and that Flash can take up 10% of the CPU just idling, eating into the battery life.

REMzzz, yes, most from backlight, but even the LCD layer draws more power than memory.

Try using Apple FaceTime . iPhone 4s is 4 hours. All other programs turned off. Ipad2 is 5-6 hours. All other programs turned off. iPad New Generation is a couple of days. Other programs running.

My Samsung Android phone has an OLED screen, which accounts for about 75% of the battery drain. This advance in memory, while interesting, won't really make any difference to a phone's battery life.

@JohnBecker

Exactly. Screens are what consume the most energy. The easiest way to get longer battery life is to turn doen the screen.

Try using Apple FaceTime . iPhone 4s is 4 hours. All other programs turned off. Ipad2 is 5-6 hours. All other programs turned off. iPad New Generation is a couple of days. Other programs running

As a developer, i can say that Apple's multitasking is not true, "unmanaged" multitasking. Even if the programs are turned on, if they aren't scheduled to do anything in the background, they could be completely "frozen" by the operating system until you return to them.

But i can't see how you can use Apple FaceTime for a couple days straight, non-stop. Surely you have to sleep at some point.

I want to be like Zichi and watch stuff on my tv via an Ipad! But I think I can do that now from my NEC laptop, just need to go and buy that cable, but back to batteries, I know many many people that got really pissed off at their Iphone batteries and just returned them to Softbank, etc..