Throttling your handheld

Larry Garfield says there is one surefire way to squeeze more battery life out of our gadgets: throttling. He doesn't mean strangling your PDA (though we've all been sorely tempted to at one point at another), he's talking about doing the opposite of overclocking your handheld (that is, making its processor run faster to improve performance) and instead actually having it run more slowly — and thus consume less power — when it's tackling less computation intensive tasks like opening an address book. A few handhelds can already do this, like Sony's Clie PEG-TH55 (pictured at right), which can automatically ramp things up when you're watching a video or playing a game, and then cut back the rest of the time. Ultimately batteries are just going to have to get better, but if you've been frustrated with your PDA conking out after just a couple of hours of use, you might want to invest in some of
the third-party apps out there that'll let you do this.