Larry Garfield muses on the downfall of battery life, and suggests ways that device makers and users can get more bang for their battery buck.
While devices have steadily gotten faster and more powerful for the past decade, battery technology has not. As a result, we've seen battery life plummet from the weeks of the original Pilot 1000 to barely a few hours on today's modern handhelds, if you don't use them too often.
Some of the biggest drops have been from former battery-king palmOne, several of whose recent devices like the Tungsten T3 and Zire 72 are great devices save for their embarrassing battery lives. Pocket PC / Windows Mobile devices have improved their power handling from their early days, but most are still at best mediocre. Take the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 610 BT/WAN, for instance. An otherwise superb feature set, but of those features suck the battery dry in no time.
In a few years, Lithium-Sulfur batteries or some other new technology may improve matters but for the time being we're stuck. However, until then both users and manufacturers can take advantage of a simple but powerful concept to improve battery life: Throttling.
Desktop users have been "overclocking" their processors for years to run them faster than rated, for more speed and more power consumption. Many users did the same using throttling software with earlier Dragonball-based Palm OS handhelds. The same can be done the other direction, however. A fast processor can be scaled down to run slower and on less power than it is rated for. A number of software products are available on the market for not too much money to let users scale their CPUs up or down on a program-by-program basis. After all, why waste 400 MHz on a memo program?
Even better are self-throttling CPUs. Intel's laptop-targeted SpeedStep technology scales the processor back several hundred MHz when running only off the battery. More recently, Sony's Handheld Engine, while it does much more, also includes transparent throttling anywhere from 8 MHz to 124 MHz depending on the needs of the program. A video program can pull all the cycles and power it needs, while looking up a phone number only gets 8 MHz and much less power. That's easily the #1 reason why Sony's CLIE PEG-TH55 manages good battery life despite having a large feature set.
In the long run, we hope more companies go the way of Intel and Sony with self-throttling hardware. Until then, many users would be well-served looking into manually throttling their devices with 3rd party software, if it is available for their devices. Throttling is not the ultimate answer to power woes, but fortunately they are equally compatible with tomorrow's battery technology as it is today. Imagine a throttled CPU with 2500 Watt-hour/Kg battery, and now you're talking about a week in the wilderness with a functional handheld. Ah, for the good old days...
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