5 Types of Technology for Improving Mobile Phone Battery Power

One of the biggest challenges facing handset makers today is how to extend the lifetime of batteries on mobile phones. Advanced mobile phones today require a lot of power to stay charged since people are using them for all-day activities (like instant messaging) as well as for activities that quickly drain the battery (like watching TV). Handset makers need to find ways to make mobile phones that will have a long-lasting battery which isn’t so big that it’s cumbersome to carry around the phone. Companies are exploring a number of different methods of making this happen including developing new display technology, creating new chip technology, exploring the advanced use of multi-core processing for mobile phones, reviewing options for improving battery chargers and looking into the harvesting of wireless power for continuous charging of mobile phones.

New Display Methods for Improved Mobile Battery Power

One of the options that is being explored for extending battery power life in mobile phones is the option of improving display methods on phones with large screens. The display module of most smartphones being created today takes up about half of the phone’s available battery power. If it is possible to improve display methods so that they use less power then the phones being created today (and those made in the future) will have longer-lasting batteries due to the reduced drainage from the display.

The most recent advance in this area of technology comes from a company called Genoa Color Technologies which utilizes a technology called Pixcale to reduce the power drainage of LCD screens. The company has actually been around for almost a decade and has been highly successful in reduce screen power consumption for televisions. They haven’t had much success breaking into the mobile phone market in the past due to the fact that yesterday’s mobile phone screens were too small for their Pixcale technology to work effectively. Today’s smartphone screens are larger and can make use of the technology. The company says use of its technology can reduce a phone display’s power consumption by approximately forty percent which would significantly extend the life of today’s smartphone batteries.

Another company called Unipixel is also working on extending mobile phone battery life by improving display screens on mobile phones. Since display screens take up so much of a phone’s battery life today, this is the area of technological development that is of most interest to many of today’s handset makers.

Mobile Phone Chips as Power Supplies

Display screens are not the only part of mobile phones that are getting attention by scientists who want to improve the battery life of cell phones. Another thing that is being studied and improved upon is chip technology for mobile phones. One example of this came at the end of last year when a company called Tyndall created new silicon chip technology dubbed Power Supply on Chip (PwrSoC). This uses micromagnetics to improve mobile phone power supply by up to ninety percent. Chip technology has been successful in improving battery life of some mobile computers so it’s certainly an area of interest for people who want to extend battery life on mobile phones.

Use of Multi-Core Processing for Mobile Phones

Another technological advance that scientists are exploring is the development of multi-core processing options for mobile phones. This option is based upon a similar development in the world of computing. Back when computers were first developed, they used single-core processors. This placed a lot of demand on the computers. Once dual-core and multi-core processing developed personal computers became capable of doing a lot more (and becoming the machines that we know them to be today).

Scientists believe that the same thing could be done with mobile phones. If so, phones could use one processor for phone tasks (like voice calls) and the other processor for computing tasks (like surfing the mobile web). The second processor would be powered down when the first one was in use. This would allow battery life to be extended even as functionality of cell phones improved. You can learn more about the advances being made in this area of scientific technology from our previous article on the topic.

New Mobile Phone Charger Technology

Some scientists are focusing less on how to create long-lasting batteries and more on how to create quick-acting phone chargers. Companies that are interested in this technology believe that it could be possible to develop phone chargers that would rapidly charge mobile phones. This would mean that it wouldn’t really matter how quickly your mobile phone battery was drained as long as you had your phone charger with you.

The most recent advance in this area of mobile phone power technology is an invention created by MIT researchers. They have developed a phone charger that can charge mobile phones at a speed 100 times faster than the chargers we are currently using. In other words, it would take only seconds to recharge your phone’s battery using this device. The creators say that the technology would be fairly easy to mass produce and could be easily adopted by the cell phone industry.

The new device actually relies on technology that has long been involved in extending mobile phone battery power: lithium-ion batteries. These batteries first started being used in mobile phones because they were longer-lasting than other cell phone battery options. The new device from MIT alters the surface structure of these types of batteries to allow for fasting charging times.

There are a lot of advantages to this type of cell phone technology. The main thing is that it would mean that handset makers could develop much smaller and lighter mobile phones since battery size would be reduced. However, there are potential drawbacks of using this option to improve mobile phone battery power. Specifically, you wouldn’t have a long-lasting battery so this is only beneficial if you’re located in an area where you have access to re-charging your mobile phone.

Harvesting Wireless Power

At the other end of the spectrum is technology that would allow for phones to never need re-charging. Or rather, the phones would continually recharge using existing wireless power so that the consumer wouldn’t have to do anything to keep the battery charged. This is a technology that is being looked into by Nokia. The company says that ambient electromagnetic radio waves can be harvested from Wi-Fi resources and used to slowly recharge cell phones. This is currently one of the more far-reaching options for improving cell phone battery life but Nokia says that it’s a distinct possibility for the future of cell phones.

So Which Technology Is Going to Work?

At this point it’s hard to tell which of these emerging technologies is going to end up becoming popular with handset makers. Reducing the power consumption of mobile phone display screens is certainly an area of major development. This is due in part to the fact that improvement in this area would significantly improve mobile phone battery life. It is also due to the fact that technology has already been developed in this area for larger screens so it’s realistic to think that this technology could be adapted for mobile phones in the relatively near future. Other technological options (like Nokia’s wireless harvesting plan) aren’t as close to actually hitting the market and therefore won’t take off as quickly if indeed they end up developing at all.