Smartphone Battery Life Jumps 50% With Wi-Fi Scaling

So, disabling/reducing Wi-Fi saves battery. NO REALLY? It took a professor and a research to figure THAT out?!

Wait, there's an iPhone on the picture. People who are using it are probably really that clueless.

"pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market"

Welp, there goes 90% of the market that this would get if it was released under a GNU like license.

or just disable your wifi when your not using it

From where do Universities get their cash for research? Aren't they being run mostly on donations from businesses/wealthy individuals? Are they allowed to ask for patents on what they discover that way?

That, by the way, is ANOTHER instance of a patent that should be NEVER allowed. They can patent a program that will do it but not a concept! Otherwise the wheel, the lever and other simple things can also be patented in a similar way.

THAT is what I mean when I say that patents slow down progress.

That's the reason we haven't been using the scan automatically feature in our cells for over 4 years now.......
The battery Life doesn't jump...... misleading title and thanks to apple once again
Same shit sold for a premium..... and more patent crap. I'd be surprised if they didn't sue the shit outta Newton, cos after all gravity belongs to the Apple...... and so would Eureka....

Something useful came from Michigan?

I thought the devices already did this since they tend to drop the CPU clock from like 1GHz, to 50MHz when the device is on standby so it would make sense to downclock the wifi radio and reduce it's polling rate to a bare minimum level.

(PS for windows mobile there was another way of reducing the wifi power issue( You put the wifi radio on a schedule, it runs on for a very short time every few minutes (or how long you want the delay) and it checks if theres any new info for it to get)

The benefit is the wifi may only be enabled for like 30 seconds per hour, allowing you to save power.

if they can do that with new wifi hardware and combine the scheduling with the reduced clock rate, then you will get much better battery life out of your devices.

I currently have a hp touchpad and the wifi power management sucks. when in standby, your only option is wifi off or on, when it is on, it is connected to the access point 100% of the time at full rate, (while the standby time is still extremely good, it is better with wifi off, (cant they strike a balance between these 2 extremes?)

Apple will prolly sue these guys into oblivion then either implement it themselves in the form of iSucklesspower or other form of gimmick.....

same thing can apply to laptops, netbooks and tablets

If you have an Android, there is an app that does something similar to this. It's called JuiceDefender. It'll turn off your data when the phone is not active saving tons of battery life.

"come on, geeks don't buy american cars lol We buy German, they have all the cool gadgets! Granted VW still cant make a car that doesn't burn out headlights..."
Its Japanese cars here in Australia not German cars.

So by using the same logic as employed in this "breakthrough".... 1) If you don't run the a/c in your car as much then you will get better gas mileage... 2) If you don't play as many songs your mp3 batteries will last longer, and 3) If you run less and take frequent breaks you won't get as tired when exercising. Brilliant!!!

"The technology requires smartphones to be equipped with processor-slowing software"

Ah, so Windows Mobile phones are already prepared!

It's hilarious how most commenters just jump onto the comment box before reading fully what the article says. And even if they've read it fully, they try not to understand what it implies before jumping into the comment box.

What the study says is to apply the notion of processor clock scaling to WiFi; instead of operating at 2.4GHz and full 100% transmit power all the time, operate at, say, 12.5% and clock down to a 900MHz mode until it detects incoming packets.

Intel should sue since they already have speedstep. First to invent no buts. You lose engineering professor.

Totally stupid!

My iphone has better battery life with wifi enabled. Turning off wifi will connect to the att network sucking your phone dry.

"1) If you don't run the a/c in your car as much then you will get better gas mileage.."
I'd say it is more like if your car had an on/off switch for the A/C, but when the engine is turned off, the A/C kept running when the switch was on. IE- it is left up to the user to turn on and off the A/C. And lets say, since turning on/off wifi on most devices means going to settings, finding that setting and clicking 'off', that it is more equivalent to my scenario, but the switch is under the hood. IE, it is a slight hassle for the user.

"2) If you don't play as many songs your mp3 batteries will last longer"
Again, more like if the mp3 player continued to play music and burning through the battery, unless you explicitly turned off the music player app when you were done.

"3) If you run less and take frequent breaks you won't get as tired when exercising." This is actually a good example.

When you are exercising, your body raises its heart-rate to pump more blood around your body to get more oxygen to where it needs to be. Perhaps also pumping adrenalin around depending on the situation. When you take a break, it goes into 'low power' mode since, it would be a waste of energy to keep doing all that... So, good job on a good analogy here. Let technology imitate the good features that nature has come up with in the last billion years or so.