Your smartphone is a minor miracle, a pocket-sized computer that can fulfill almost every whim. But none of its superpowers matter a bit if it runs out of juice. With removable batteries becoming more and more rare, you’ve got to take good care of the one you got. Fortunately, it’s not to hard keep the lithium-ion powering your everything machine happy if you follow a few simple rules.
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If Apple’s new desktop operating system has one major point of emphasis, it’s battery life. Just installing the new OS can boost your web browsing time by an hour. And that’s just the beginning.
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While your iPhone’s new operating system comes with plenty of advantages, iOS 7’s not without its drawbacks. Battery life just ain’t quite what you’d want it to be
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There’s a ton of info on the web. You’re never going to read it all, but you want to, so your browser has fistfuls of open tabs waiting for that rainy day when you’ll want to read a two-month-old article that’s no longer relevant to anything. But have you ever wondered what all those tabs are doing to your battery life? Wired’s Rhett Allain did, so he measured it for Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
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There is a disturbing trend in the gadget world, and it’s that laptop, tablet and phone makers aren’t taking battery life seriously enough. Yes, having touch on a Windows 8 notebook is great, but not if the computer lasts an hour and a half less than one without that capability. And what good is a smartphone with an HD display and superfast processor if you have to plug it in around lunchtime? We run our homemade battery test, which involves continuous Web surfing at 40 percent brightness, on every device we review. And if the endurance isn’t good enough, regardless of the gadget’s other features, we simply won’t recommend it. More »
The earliest of early adopters have now been using Windows Phone 8 for almost three weeks—and it seems that there may be a few teething problems. In particular, some users are reporting infuriating random reboots and some battery life issues. More »
It’s hard not to be impressed by the A6 engine in the new iPhone 5, since it’s now proven to deliver a double-shot of great performance and class-leading battery life. But silicon stories like that don’t happen over night or even over the course of a year — in fact, analyst Linley Gwennap has traced the origins of the A6 all the way back to 2008, when Steve Jobs purchased processor design company P.A. Semi and set one of its teams to work on creating something “insanely great” for mobile devices.
Although Apple is steadfastly secretive about its components, Gwennap’s history of the A6 (linked below) is both plausible and a straight-up good read for anyone interested in the more fundamental aspects of their gadgets. Whereas the A5 processor stuck closely to ARM’s Cortex-A9 design, Gwennap is convinced — just like Anandtech is –that the A6 treads a very different path: it’s still based on ARM’s architecture and it’s likely fabricated by Samsung using a cutting-edge 32nm process, but it’s an in-house vision of what a mobile chip should be. It’s the culmination of four years of hard work and perhaps half a billion dollars of investment.
That’s not to say it’s the most powerful chip out there, or even the chip most tailored to its host device — after all, Samsung also designs great chips for some of its own smartphones. Indeed, Gwennap says that the A6 is probably a dual-core processor that is no more complex than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 (let alone the S4 Pro) or the forthcoming generation of Cortex-A15 chips, while its clock speed could be as low as 1.2GHz — versus a 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos in the Note II and even a 2GHz Intel chip in Motorola’s new RAZR i. However, Gwennap predicted that even if the A6 falls short of its rivals “in raw CPU performance,” it’d make up for it in terms of low power consumption — which is precisely what we’ve confirmed in our review.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
How the iPhone 5 got its ‘insanely great’ A6 processor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Battery life in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion kind of sucks. A lot. It’s very very bad, and was only made a little better with the 10.8.1 update a few weeks ago. But it looks like help is on the way. More »
If you’re getting tired of seeing the purported guts of the iPhone 5, we feel for you. But it’s like following a cookie crumb trail that might, possibly, hopefully lead us to some real semblance of information about the next iPhone. Or at least help us connect the dots. Case in point: here’s the rumored iPhone 5 battery. It’s taller and bigger. More »
Progress is lumpy. The future is attained in a series of epochal strides, each followed by a lot of relatively inconsequential shuffling forward. The invention of the internet (and especially the consumer-friendly web) was a rare giant step that motivated immense adoption of computers and digital lifestyles. A global marketplace of online citizens spawned gadgets, software apps, corporate gold-rushing and other feverish shuffling.
Even with the opulent gadgetry we admire and enjoy, the whole expanding tech bubble seems to be reaching for something beyond itself. The incremental improvements of personal technology don’t thrust into the future as much as push against constraining walls of the present. Sharper screens and thinner computers are delightful results of corporate development cycles. But we are tethered to the present, which one day will seem primitive in retrospect, by two unglamorous bridles: power and connectivity.
Continue reading Editorial: Physics and politics stand in the way of true mobile
Editorial: Physics and politics stand in the way of true mobile originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Sep 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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